The Tao of Apathy (5 page)

“
Then why do I have to go through
radiation, if all the cancer is gone?”

“
To kill any cancer in the nearby
tissues. You were explained all this. I’ll dim your
lights.”

“
It doesn’t matter, Janis. It has
its hold on me. It has been two weeks and I still feel weak and out
of breath.”

“
I wished I looked as good as you.
God, you look thirty, but you’re what? Forty-five. I look like the
one with lung cancer. Look how pale I am.” Janis knew it could take
months for a patient to recover from the surgery and she should
expect to feel weak and out of breath, so without another word, she
gave Yolanda something to make her sleep.

After Janis got Yolanda to bed, so that she
could stare at the ceiling and wish that she wasn’t spending her
precious moments of life staring at the ceiling, Janis went to find
her supervisor. She wanted to go home, turn on a soap opera and
take a nap.

Janis’ supervisor, Mary Eddy, had been the
head nurse of the Cancer Wing for nine years. At forty-six, Mary
was tall and svelte. Her permed red hair helmeted her red
complexioned face. She liked to wear dark eye make-up as she had as
a teenager and had a young face that showed wrinkles only when she
smiled or laughed. She was one of the unofficial leaders of Saint
Jude’s with almost every invoice from supply having her signature
on them. She performed her job with kindness, understanding, and a
devotion to do everything she could for the patients. Janis
considered her to be her mortal enemy.

She was wary of asking Mary for the third time
in the same week to go home. Her strong work ethic demanded that
her place of employment screw her over first. In her other places
of employment, she had felt justified in calling in sick, forging
fake Medicare claims and framing her boss. So far, she owed Saint
Jude’s a couple. Try as she may, her conscience couldn’t come up
with a good excuse to fake a headache and go home.

“
I blame the lights for my
constant headaches,” she told Mary, as her mouth had no problem
coming up with one.

“
Well, Janis,” Mary said. She
wanted to confront Janice without a confrontation. “No one else
gets a headache from the lights.”

“
You went home with a headache on
Monday,” Janis said angrily, happy that she felt
affronted.

“
That was from the stale air in
this building,” Mary said in reference to the headache she had left
early with that would have been a hangover instead of a headache
except she had still been drunk.

“
Mine, too, then,” Janis said. She
knew she was going to have to get a job that was stressful and
tense. She dreamed of a work environment that paid fairly well, but
would overwork and dump on her. Then she could stop showing
up.

How she envied public school
teachers.

Chapter 5

Janis’ employer, The Sisters of the Sorrowful
State and its subsidiary, Saint Jude’s Medical Center and Hospital
of Lansing, Michigan, decided to help her not feel guilty about
being a bad employee. The efficiency consultation company they
hired came in and began to take away all the positive things Janis
complained about.

“
The Company” and the board of
trustees began to reconfigure every department and adjust all the
employee’s work patterns. They began by renaming departments. They
decided that the best way to dramatize the streamlining was to
unsimplify things. The Emergency Room was now Immediate Care
Services. Because the Intensive Care Unit now had a similar
sounding acronym, it was renamed Special and Overtly-critical Life
Services (SOL). Additionally, the Nutritional Services Department
became The Accredited Personnel Resources of Nutritional Services
(APRONS); and the Central Supply department became the Axial
Replenishment Requisition Center ARRC (often pronounced as a word
with a soft C). Firing people was eliminated completely which
sounded like a positive thing. However, the program of Realignment
and Reduction of Associated Salary Staffing levels was implemented.
Oddly, only management believed that people were no longer
fired.

Yes, the first phase of the re-organization
plan cut every part of the hospital’s daily operation without
exception; except for the doctors, the department directors, their
secretaries and the catered parties. In fact, some of the
departments had been cut so much that new jobs with higher pay had
to be created for middle management. At Janis’ level, though, they
had only cut staff and increased job duties. Janis was thrilled to
be thrust into poor working conditions and was not the least bit
worried about being one of those nurses terminated. Unlike many of
the nurses that had put many dedicated years of service, she had a
great service record.

Janis would not be laid off because the
layoffs were based on annual evaluations and jealous head nurses
made sure to include the weaknesses of the top performing nurses in
their yearly evaluations. They also knew if they told a dedicated
nurse such as Mary Eddy that she needed to improve her
communications skills, she would, in fact, try. But if Janis’
supervisor (who happened to be Mary Eddy) put Janis’ weaknesses and
unexcused absences on paper, she would have to fire Janis and
firing a bad employee meant taking a big chance of getting someone
worse. So when it came to reviewing personnel files to see who
would be laid off, the best were gotten rid of first. Janis was
short listed to remain on staff. She celebrated her job security by
rarely coming in to work.

With the effort to cut down on wages paid out,
many worked overtime. Everyone took on extra hours to fill the gaps
caused by the reduction in staff and they still worked in fear of
losing their jobs. The atmosphere in the hospital was tense and
filled with mistrust. Janis got jazzed every time a duty was added
in her job description and laughed every time they put her on the
schedule to work an extra weekend.

In the past, Janis’ co-workers had rarely
talked to her because they had found her whinny, nasty, and
critical. They had even been reluctant to look at her as she had a
face that started off friendly enough with large warm eyes and a
small nose, but below that it became acrimonious. Her small mouth
was often clamped into a grimace by her small chin and creased into
a crooked frown that was apt to send shivers down their spines. But
now they began to follow her around for pointers on how to carp
about their jobs. Like a small child on a sitcom, she began to
originate catch phrases. Her best known was to refer to the new CEO
and the board of directors as Barney and friends. Janis could not
be counted on to help out, take care of her own patients, or show
up for any weekend shifts, but the fellow nurses began to enjoy her
rancor, now that it wasn’t directed at them.

But Janis was the only one happy with the
changes. Certified Nursing Assistants or CNAs were hired at six
dollars an hour so that the high paid registered nurses could be
reassigned to positions outside of Saint Jude’s. The few nurses
left supervised and directed the CNAs to do the direct care duties
such as wiping shit off of old people’s asses. The CNAs had job
security like nobody else, but they even they had low
morale.

People were afraid of losing their livelihood.
Stories spread throughout the hospital of people being escorted by
armed guards to their cars after being given a 12-month a year
vacation without pay. The guards were hired because Saint Jude’s
worried that the ex-employees would be ungrateful for the free time
to look for a new job.

It was everyone’s goal to cut wasteful
man-hours and procedures, so everyone set out to lighten their
light workloads and give mass to everyone else's. All staff feared
their jobs would be eliminated; some were guaranteed it. They
fretted and panicked; they stewed and fumed; they drank and abused
their spouses. To combat this, the board had The C-YA (Center for
Yearly Assessments, formerly the Education Department) come up with
a training program entitled “Change is Good so Let Us Screw You
with a Smile.” The staff of C-YA was glad to do it. It relieved
their stress because they would at least have a job while they
presented this in-service to the different departments.

In response to all these changes, the people
that had been organizing the union for the last ten years decided
the time was right to act. They were finally getting a response
from the other employees that went beyond a head nod and a “yeah,
we should do that.” Faced with the possibility that all that they
had dreamed of could come into being, they quickly withdrew their
petition and kept quiet. After all, it was one thing to have a pipe
dream, but a whole other deal when somebody packs your bowl and
tells you to cash it. Now that people were listening, they had
nothing to say. However, others stepped up to begin organizing a
union for all the employees.

Management responded to the threat of a union
by establishing The Freedom to Act Committee Team, which sent memos
of concern to employees. These memos told them how worse off they
would be with united representation. “We suggest that you seriously
consider the problems a union would cause,” one memo read, “because
the administration cares about the staff of Saint Jude’s. Unions
are only concerned with taking your dues. We are your family and we
are a team. Everyone is an important and vital part of Saint Jude’s
that can easily be replaced.”

Mr. Crapper gave a meeting explaining what
changes were going to be made in his Axial Replenishment
Requisition Center (Central Supply). Crapper reassured his
employees and this terrified them. He was a horrendous speaker and
no one understood what he had actually said. Crapper was a bad
speaker because he was continually afraid of the several men in his
department that had crushes on him. More than once, one of his men
suggested a special reenactment of “An Officer and A
Gentleman.”

In the Human Resource Department, Mr. Crow had
been directed to reorganize his department and cut his staff by ten
percent. However, he had permission to hire two more people to help
him with the staff reduction.

Containment, Refuse, Purification Services
(formerly Housekeeping) was the first to be cut. At first, The
Company’s plan was to wait until last to change this department,
but the Board of Directors figured that the housekeepers would not
mind losing their crappy jobs. Irene was the first to get the nod
for forced early retirement. The Director of CRP, Doctor Daneeka,
was fat, bald, and smoked cigars, but he wasn’t a medical doctor.
He held his doctorate in animal husbandry.

“
Irene,” Daneeka began, “I think
you probably know why I have you here. You have been working in our
department for thirty-seven years. You rarely missed a day and I
have always felt I could make you do any job. You have earned a
nice, restful retirement.”

“
Yes sir,” Irene, the hygienically
challenged housekeeper, said. “Just a couple of more years is all I
need to be able to afford to retire-”

“
That’s wonderful,” Daneeka said.
“Do you know where will you be working?”

“
Dr. Daneeka, are you trying to
tell me that you are going to transfer me to cleaning the Pig Liver
Transplant Research Department?”

Dr. Daneeka puffed on his cigar and rubbed his
head. “I wouldn’t do that to you. I am just firing you. Oops, I
mean, you are getting a nice, restful, early
retirement.”

Irene still didn’t understand. “What do you
mean? In one of those employee bulletins, we were told that nobody
was going to get fired."

“
Oh, you’re right, Irene. And even
though it kinda feels like I did, I didn’t fire you. What I did was
implement a manpower adjustment on your ass. Now hit the
road.”

Mr. Seuss was an excellent speaker and very
eloquently told his kitchen staff that there were going to be
massive cutbacks. “Many positions will be combined and streamlined
to reduce any inefficiency. I am going to create a whole new
paradigm in the kitchen that challenges our strongly held ideas
about providing the patients quality food,” he told them. “So that
we can continue to exceed expectations with excellence.” However,
Seuss was a better speaker than director and only one person would
end up losing his job.

In the room filled with white clothed people,
Bigger was the most afraid of Seuss’s threats. While he certainly
hated his job and he considered pushing food carts around a blank
spot on a form letter –to be filled in later with a good job; this
dead-end, low-paying, respectless, unskilled, greasy, back-crushing
job was all he had. With arms crossed and crossed legs twitching,
he felt afraid, embarrassed and relieved. He relaxed when he
realized that Saint Jude would fire the loyal, dedicated employees
that had worked in the kitchen for twenty years before they would
let him go. After he relaxed, he began to brood. There was no
reason it couldn’t be him and many reasons why it should. Then he
thought that change could be good. Then he remembered he hated
change.

Joe looked over to Bigger with a raised
eyebrow and hoped Bigger wasn’t having some sort of seizure. He
also hoped that Bigger would be the first to lose his job. He knew
that his best friend enjoyed working with the elderly ladies that
coddled him. “We won’t get fired,” he whispered to Bigger. “He
would be doing us too big a favor.”