As seemingly everyone in the two state area now knows, Chiquita is vacating the Port of Gulfport in favor of the Port of New Orleans and the Slabbed Nation is clamoring for some sage analysis. As luck would have it, my becoming a bananaman derives from the same event from which the name of this website derives, Hurricane Katrina. Everyone knows that Chiquita imports bananas into the US via Gulfport’s (soon to be New Orleans) Break Bulk cargo facility from Central America. The company backhauls huge paper rolls to Central America that are used to make the banana boxes used for shipping. Here is what my neighborhood looked like after the storm when the rocket scientists at the Port made the call to leave everything in place before the storm:
Most of the rolls clustered at Broad Street and Highway 90 but a few even made it to my neighborhood proper:
Naturally, having witnessed the destruction first hand coupled with nothing happening in the cleanup front I felt the need to agitate and since Chiquita was the only public company among the port tenants it was the CQB message board on Yahoo that I brought the full measure of five weeks of frustration. Within a week or so of my arrival on the CQB cyber scene, I was met at my slab by a contractor on October 2, 2005 who was armed with an ROE and heavy equipment. Word got out among my old neighbors, additional ROEs were executed on the spot and we were fast tracked for cleanup. This internet thing is like magic in skilled hands as the following video illustrates: Continue reading “How I became a made bananaman and discovered that Miss Chiquita was a government subsidy whore”