The Art of Doing

HOW JUAN CORZO JR., TOILET PAPER KING, IS DEALING WITH SUCCESS IN A PANDEMIC: Coming from Miami, I’ve lived through quarantines my whole life. In hurricane season I’ve seen shortages of bottled water, food, gas. But I’ve never seen a shortage of our product, toilet paper…until now. It’s been crazy. I’ve hardly slept. The phone never stops ringing. It’s retailers I used to call every month who never called me back. Now they’re calling me and telling me when it comes to my toilet paper they want to move right to the front of the line! We went from 120,000 rolls to 240,000 a week. We’ve pushed production to the max, running lines in the factory 24/7 for the very first time. Sure, it feels good that we’re doing good, but it’s sad to see that everyday, three to four hundred people show up at the factory looking for work. We’ve been able to hire about 18 workers who were laid off in the pandemic from other jobs—restaurant workers, bartenders, and others. I’d love to hire more, but it’s going to take me at least eight weeks to open up another line of production. I’ve seen what some people are selling toilet paper for, tripling the cost or more. But I’m not raising our prices. Toilet paper is a need thing, not a want thing. My main focus is, keep everybody stocked. To me success is being able to fulfill this need for our community as best we can. The next time it may be us needing something we don’t have.” 🎨

>You can find Juan Corzo Jr, 3rd generation in the paper industry, working 20 hour days to meet demand.
>Cheers to the underappreciated heroes of these strange times. If you know of one we should know about, please let us know in the comments! 🙌

RADICAL TIMES CALL FOR RADICAL ACTION
Find Your Road is a place to share stories of people who are figuring out how to survive and thrive in the pandemic.
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HOW JOE COCCARDI IS WORKING TO PROTECT US AGAINST COVID-19: “My father was a fireman in Jersey City, so I'm used to emergencies. We all know what a big fire looks like. But what does a pandemic or a nuclear power failure or a food contamination crisis look like? You look out your window and it looks like every other day. The things my father did with hoses, ladders, & fire boats, we do with respirators, safety equipment, & public information. I’m in industrial hygiene, which means I design safety systems to protect people. I've been doing it for 40 years. I have my own company but when there's a local, national, or global emergency, I get the call—Haitian Earthquake, 9/11, Sandy Hook, BP oil spill. I’m part of what we call an Incident Management Team. We have about 100 people with specific expertise—management, administration, logistics. In my case, safety engineering. They are two teams, an East and a West team. When an event happens everyone on the team is alerted, & the team’s activated. You'll never see our names in the paper but there are a lot of Spider-Men like me out there protecting people. We operate under the radar, below the level of politics, & notoriety. In this case, I work with dr’s and nurses in federal facilities, quarantine stations, and anywhere we’ve been requested by local governments. The dr’s and nurses do the exact same thing they do every day, but now they have a different sanitation and decon procedure. They have to do it with a mask, gloves, & protective gown. It’s a massive change. I don't tell them how to take a pulse, I tell them how to take a pulse with gloves on. I get people to engineer themselves so they can be as Herculean as possible. A lot of people on the local level are doing great work—like the Minutemen in the American Revolution—so I’m more optimistic than pessimistic about getting through this. I've learned no matter what the crisis is, there’s always a way out. For me, winning the game doesn’t mean being on Wide World of Sports, it means everybody else gets to watch whatever they want on TV & I get to sit on my back porch with a Corona.”🎨
>Next time you see someone working on the frontline give them a👍