Hurricanes

As I read aloud articles about Hurricane Katrina in the New York Times, Joe frantically tries to keep the website that his company hosts online and running smoothly. He is in charge of maintaining it, and it has crashed about a dozen times a day for the last three days. It is the home site of the United Jewish Federation and has a donation page on it for hurricane relief. There is simply too much traffic to handle. Donations have reached 1.2 million and are climbing. Every time it shuts down, Joe says, "I'm killing people."
Would someone give up the first time a donation didn't work? If just entering your credit card number on a website failed to send your donation through, would you try again tomorrow, or write a check, or do something else? They need money just as badly a month from now as they do today, but by then many people will have lost interest. I've read the paper three days in a row now, unheard of for me. We want to read the shocking stories, how police have quit and how babies are starving and women are being raped in the Superdome so we can all tut-tut and swear it wouldn't happen in our city. It's like the end of the world down there. I'm sure it'll make for a good movie someday.