The Tao of Apathy (3 page)

“
Really?” Petty looked around the
room, too. “I would like to meet them.”

“
So would I. I don’t know who they
are, but I guess they are going to help the board use our
“re-engineering” to get rid of some ineffective personnel.” The
management trainee shot the old CEO a look. Grumby chuckled. “I
wonder who will be the first to go.”

“
Would you read back to me what we
have been whispering about so far?” Grumby bellowed to his
secretary who had been standing next to his desk.

“
Sure,” Betty, his secretary,
said. “This hospital provides the best medical care in the Lansing,
Michigan area and the board is not happy with that at all. They are
paying a company a pile of money to find a need to fire one-third
of the staff and they want you to take the credit for
that.”

“
Good. Make a copy of your notes
for our young trainee here. Yeah, giving me the credit for coming
up with this plan is a little peace offering from the board to show
that they are not angry with me just because I am opposed it.
Okay,” he said, leaning back and turning his chair in Betty’s
direction. Betty flipped to a new page in her steno pad and sat
down. “I’m going to give the agenda for the meeting. I want you to
type this up, Xerox it and hand it to every man at the meeting.
Once you get them handed out, collect them again and shred them.
Okay. item of business number one- waste. I really don’t have
anything to say about that,” Grumby said as an aside to
Petty.

“
Second item of business,” he
dictated to his secretary, “reducing non-value added employees. Do
we need an outside company to determine who the non-value added
employees are? dash dash dash-Yes.”

“
Why sir?” Betty asked. “Why do we
need an outside company? Why not just get rid of some middle and
upper management people like many companies?”

“
That’s why,” Grumby laughed. He
was getting angry with her. “To make the decision that it’s not us
middle and upper management that need to be let go. We are valuable
assets after all. Many of us are so talented that we got promoted
by our friends even though we failed at lower positions. Let’s
continue shall we, dear? Next item of business—raises. On my
personal notes please write: ‘We can’t give raises; the hospital is
broke.”

“
What about the three million
dollars in profits last year,” Betty blurted out.

“
Except for that, we’re broke,
honey. We need that money for a new administration building, which
we need to built to get rid of our surplus money. It’s complicated,
Heather, and if we weren’t in love with you, I would not bother to
explain it, but the federal government doesn’t let non-profit
organizations make that much money, so we have to spend it. And if
we spend all our money, then we are broke. Besides, I bet you
didn’t know that our facilities are cramped to the point of having
only one office for each management personnel.” Grumby shook his
head. “Raises would be too much fat. In fact, Mr. Petty, our
current financial status mandates that we replace some veteran
staff with high school students.”

“
Sir,” Betty interrupted, slapping
her notebook on his desk. “First of all, stop calling me Heather.
That was your last secretary. I’m twice her age and she did not
have a relationship with you either unless you call a restraining
order a relationship. Second of all, you can’t put some kid in a
professional position. And third of all, most loneliness is
self-inflicted.”

“
Of course, Heather,” he said as
he walked behind her and looked down her blouse. “We are not going
to put those kids in professional positions. We will eliminate the
professional positions and create internships so that we don’t have
to pay them.”

“
I’m sure the independent company
will recommend that to us if we tell them to,” Petty
interrupted.

While scowling at Mr. Petty, Betty leaned
forward to take away Grumby’s view of her middle-aged breasts. She
had been a secretary too long to take time to rebuke Grumby.
Instead she pitied him. If he tried anything that was listed on his
last secretary’s harassment suit, however, she would deck
him.

“
So let’s get on with this. Agenda
item number whatever—Infection control.” Grumby wiped his glasses
with a handkerchief and looked at himself in his vanity mirror on
the cabinet behind his desk. He admired his chin that looked strong
in the mirror, although weak on his face. “Yeah that’s the ticket.
Infection control.”

Betty jotted this down and then looked at him
with pen raised. “Our goal is to eliminate all personnel that have
any contact with patients.”

She dropped her pen. “Don’t you think that
that will impact the patients without anyone to help them? Won’t
they just die then?”

Grumby couldn’t figure out what she was
talking about. If he didn’t love her, he would fire her for her
irrelevant questions. “It’s just a goal, Heather.”

“
I’m Betty, Jonas. Heather was
your last vict- secretary.”

“
Right. Let’s get back to the
business at hand, shall we, Heather? You are thinking that the
hospital will then be understaffed, right?”

“
Not exactly.”

“
We are not going to be
understaffed,” Grumby said, waving his index finger in the air.
“Because after we cut the medical staff, we will double the
administrative staff to more efficiently direct those left. In
fact, and write this down, we will hire more department managers to
help in the process now, before we cut the number of departments.”
He smiled like a schoolboy that had just made his whole class laugh
by farting, but had actually pooped his pants a little and liked
it.

Betty stood up and glared at him. “And what
kind of environment is that going to create for the nurses, the
LPN, and the techs, not to mention the patients?”

Grumby came around to the front of his desk
and sat on the edge of it so that her breasts were eye level for
him. “I don’t understand your questions, Heather.”

Chapter 3

Joe took off his jacket in the locker room and
put on the crunchy apron he wore yesterday (reusing dirty aprons
had been his boss’s cost-saving idea). Joe immediately began to
long for his first smoke break. He gave a nod to Bigger who was
grabbing two food carts to be loaded up. It was Bigger’s job to
take the carts filled with trays up to the different patient units.
He did not hand out the trays; he only had to deliver the carts and
then pick them up when they were full of dirty dishes after the
meal. The elderly ladies that Bigger worked with in the kitchen
considered his job the hardest because he had to push the big,
heavy carts. Bigger considered his job the hardest because he had
to work with elderly ladies.

Joe passed the bakery and was not surprised to
not see the newbie there. The kitchen no longer needed a baker as
most pies and cakes were bought and delivered frozen, but Mr.
Seuss, the director of Nutritional Services, had hired one anyway.
It could work out well because the new guy never showed up for
work. Still, Joe swore under his breath. Seuss would make Joe do
the grunt jobs that Joe had pushed off on the new baker. Joe
grabbed a new paper hat and squeezed it on his head and then went
to help Helen make breakfast.

Helen had made scrambled eggs every day for
the last fifteen years barring vacations, every other weekends, and
Tuesdays. And on each of those days, she made them wrong. She
insisted on setting the heat too high on the griddle and had to
scrape burnt egg off the smoking cooking-surface before each new
batch of eggs. This put her and everyone behind, especially Joe who
had to fry her bacon and sausages before doing his own job. That
had been Seuss’s solution to the scrambled eggs dilemma. Why bother
trying to change Helen when in ten short years she would either
retire or die? Why get into a confrontation with Helen who argued
for days when forced to change when Joe would only quietly
sulk.

As the first tray was set on the conveyor
belt, Joe grabbed Helen’s first batch of runny and burnt eggs over
to the serving line. Ester put silverware on the orange trays and
then put the trays on the big conveyor belt that dragged the meal
trays past the other ladies waiting at the appointed stations.
Margaret was in charge of the drinks that the patients circled on
the menu cards- juice, milk, coffee, and/or Ensure milk shakes.
Thelma set plates of eggs and greasy meat of choice on the trays.
Augusta put fruit and anything else that the patients or their
nurse asked for beside the plates and Donna doled out the pastry
and bread items.

This assembly line worked as efficiently as it
could. Each person just had to read each menu slip and get her
assigned area of the food group. However, Ester put the trays on
the conveyor too fast, which pissed off Donna who was always behind
on the toast. Everyone would then yell at her as they stood waiting
for Helen to bring the scrambled eggs. If the line stopped for a
moment, Ester would run to get something done in her office. Then
the conveyor began again and Bigger would have to do her job until
she came back out. Otherwise, Bigger waited for a cart to get full
and then he hauled it to the unit.

Often he would return from a floor, 2B- The
Birth Center (formerly the Maternity Ward) for example, to have a
nurse call down for another tray. It would seem that his bringing
up the food cart reminded them that they needed a meal tray for a
new admittance. The kitchen ladies would make a meal for the new
patient and then Bigger would return to the floor to deliver it.
The extra trip drove Bigger nuts, but it kept him out of the
kitchen where by now Margaret would be feigning a minor
stroke.

During this time, Joe usually opened five-
pound cans of vegetables for lunch or pulled food out of the
freezer for the day after next. Today, Joe washed potatoes in the
sink with steel wool and set them on trays for the supper meal. He
scrubbed hard; sweat already soaked into his hat. He looked over to
Helen who was still frying eggs. She was his supervisor, a good one
that worked slow to make Joe do more work and harped on him for the
mistakes she made, but always got him the days he needed off and
let him sneak out for smoke breaks. Helen, like many who had worked
in the kitchen for decades, never dared to strive for a better
paying job that recognized dedication. For example, Taco Bell. Fast
food restaurants at least recognized good employees with employee
of the month plaques.

Ester was Bigger’s supervisor. She muttered
under her breath, threw things at people that didn’t listen to her,
and then cried when people stood up for themselves. But it was she
that people could ask anything about preparing food or what a
specific diet called for. A patient on a 2500-calorie diabetic diet
got things a patient on a 1500-calorie diabetic diet couldn’t have.
Sometimes a doctor would order a kind of meal that only Ester knew.
She knew where everything in the stockroom was. She knew how to cut
a piece of meat so that it was five ounces without a scale. Bigger
respected her so much that he often did things wrong so that she
would yell at him.

“
Bigger, what did Mr. Seuss tell
you about your pants?” Ester growled at him after the breakfast
trays were delivered.

“
He said all the worthless dorks
in green pants would be fired.”

“
Shouldn’t you be fired then? You
need to go to the locker room and change your pants right now.”
Bigger ignored her and went to cut up Jell-O cubes.

Margaret came over and helped him, although
one person could manage the cut up Jell-O job. All of the women
doted on Bigger and treated him like a grandson. If they saw a rip
in his shirt, they would sew it up for him. They asked him about
his wife and kids and liked to bake treats for them. Bigger was
there to open jars for the ladies and get stuff off the top shelves
of the storeroom (in the kitchen, sexism worked well). They told
Bigger he had potential and asked how his search for a better
career was going. When they heard how badly it was going, they were
not disappointed in him. They told Bigger it took time. Working in
the kitchen was misery for Bigger, but suffering is where love
makes its home.

Chapter 4

Mr. Crapper followed Mr. Grumby and Mr. Petty
to the ten o’clock meeting, keeping far enough behind them to make
it seem as if he wasn’t following, yet close enough not to give
them the heebie-jeebies. Grumby was stopped several times by people
wanting to kiss up to him and to be introduced to Mr. Petty’s butt.
Crapper had to stop and just stand in the hallway. To keep from
looking odd, he stooped over and signed his name to his legal pad.
Then, he tore off the sheet and threw it away.

In the conference room, the directors of the
departments blinked their eyes in response to the early hour and
downed the free coffee. Crapper slid into the room on the heels of
Grumby and Petty and took his seat at the long table. Seated next
to him were Dr. Swagger, Chief of Staff; Jim Crow, Director of
Human Resources; Walter Seuss, Director of Nutritional Services;
Sky Bone, Director of Radiology; Cant Nough, Director of Medical
Records; Don Rickles, Director of Complementary Therapies; and
James Liberace, Director of Budgeting. On the other side of the
table were Pearl Swine, John McIntrye, and Doctor Sidney Freedman,
who were the directors of Education, Treasury, and The Interior;
along with Dr. Daneeka, Director of Containment, Refuse, And
Purification Services (formerly Housekeeping); Lester Boot,
Director of the Medical Library; Robert Englund, Director of Sleep
Disorders; and Justin Dyalready, Director of Geriatrics. On
vacation was Sherm Shylock, Vice President of Charitable Services.
Absent as usual were the directors of Nursing, Emergency, and
Surgery who were in meetings with their lawyers.