Clarion Content

Welcome to an on-going work of meta-fiction and gonzo journalism reminiscent of the late Hunter S. Thompson.

Brought to you by one of Durham's very own.

Some language and situations may not be appropriate for younger readers!!!

Follow this link to Chapter One.

Follow this link to Chapter Two.


Chapter Three, "No Ian"

There are good ways and bad ways to wake up in the morning.

A good way is to be awoken by an alarm clock playing some early Led Zeppelin, while a scantily-clad bathycolpian woman flounces into your bedroom bearing scalding coffee and a plate of eggs, in preparation for the first day on the job of a new promotion which came with a brand new company car which you discovered the evening before could hit 120 mph without any trouble.

A bad way to wake up in the morning is with a throbbing hangover and the vision of a large, hairy caucasion buttock being thrust into your line of sight.

"Dude, is this a zit or an abscess? Can you lance it?"

My Chuck tends to tilt my mornings in one way, rather than the other.

Now the Chuck is not the only person in the world who mistakenly tries to utilize me for medical advice, he just happens to do so in the most memorable ways.

I should explain that I do work at a hospital. This does, in many ways, explain why many people ask but, of course, is despite the fact that I am no more qualified to tell you if your ankle is broken or merely sprained than your average tattoo artist or aromatherapist. Even when I get to work, the fact that I'm the guy wearing a suit instead of a nurse's uniform means that I get all sorts of hacking coughs sprayed in my face, befouled infants posteriors presented to me, or hideous wounds shoved in front of my face in the mistaken impression that I can fix them. Really, people, I'm just here to take your money. Take your problems to the guy with the stethoscope. Especially if I'm not at work, and all you know is that I've got a hospital ID tag unfortunately still pinned onto my shirt.

So it ain't easy being the guy who works in a hospital and doesn't wear scrubs. On some days where I'm feeling particularly like an asshole, I'll actually offer a medical opinion in these cases, which tends to involve a cursory look, a jabbing finger into a sore spot, and a quick pronouncement of "It's lupus or leprosy. Either way, it'll have to come off."

No the worst part of not being a clinical staffer is that there's a very distinct hierarchy in the hospital world. The doctors are lords of the manor. They're everyone's boss, and they know it. Immediately below them come the nurses: that fun breed of women and devil-may-care gay men who think they're your mother. All of them think they're smarter than the docs. Below them, there's a swarm nurses' aids, radiology technicians, lab rats, and other assorted first-aid certified folks that still barely count as human beings in the eyes of our first two categories.

At the bottom of the heap, barely above the true scum, the enemy: the patients(!) come the herd of unskilled labor: security, the cleaning staff, the gruel sloppers in the cafeteria, the porters who shove the patients back and forth between floors.

Now I fall somewhere in the middle of this feudal system, between the clinical staff and the peasant worker-bees, which generally means that when one side gets miffed with the other, I'm lumped in with the enemy. This suits me very much, of course, as I don't want to go to their birthday parties, anyway.

A few weeks before our story begins, there had been a rash of theft from the emergency room breakroom. Lunches eaten, umbrellas borrowed, and the outright theft of an apparently expensive pair of earrings that had no business being left unattended in any office breakroom, much less one where hundreds of people have access. The result of the outcry and hub-bub was the obvious conclusion that the thievery must have been committed by a member of the serf-caste, and therefore anyone without a fancy set of initials after their name would be henceforth banned from said breakroom. While this meant that eating lunch was a tad difficult, it was something I could deal with.

A few days later, one of the lockers in the male employee's bathroom was broken into. These lockers were split between myself, Lou the Security Guard (an old buddy of mine), and about 20 assorted doctors and male nurses. A few years back, there was a more even split between the clinical staff and the 'others' in the men's locker rooms, but this balance had slowly shifted when the MDs decided to not let new pond scum store their dirty Nikes in the same room as the docs did.

But I digress. Two non-clinicals in the locker room (also the bathroom, remember), the theft had to be one of us. Much discussion was made of putting a lock on the door, which would have been inconvenient. It's one thing to find a quiet corner of a stairwell to eat your tuna sandwich. It's quite another thing to find a nice comfy supply closet to relieve oneself in. Oh, it can be done, especially after Pedro, the internist with really bad gas has been in the proper bathrooms, but you won't be making friends with the janitorial staff, who find the excuse of "It's just a frickin' drain!" to be less than comforting. Happily, things never came to the lock on the locker/bathroom door, but the whole situation put me on my guard.

I walked into work one evening to see a sad sight. Lou's locker was cleaned out: the old Minnesota Vikings sticker had been peeled off the front, and a quick check with some of the other security guards confirmed that Lou had finally retired and moved back to Duluth. Summer was rapidly approaching, he was fully vested in his pension, and his old lady decided she wasn't interested in another July or August in North Carolina. I can hardly blame the guy, so don't think this was the reason that I turned red with rage, yanked the paper towel dispenser off the wall, and only barely restrained myself from hurling it into the mirror behind the sinks.

No. What got me more aggravated than a ballet instructor with a class full of epileptics was that the new occupant of the locker had attached a strip of scotch tape to the front of Lou's old locker. Written, in simple block letters was "No Ian"

Now this was one step too far. Being included in a general cast of the distrusted, squalid masses was one thing. Being singled out as an object of suspicion by whatever ass had co-opted Lou's old locker? This meant war.

War, for a bureaucrat, means a lot of angry phone calls. Frothing with the rage of a fat child sent to bed before dessert, I rang up my boss. My manager is a phlegmatic sort, and shrugged off with my demands for a witch hunt, inquisition, and some good old fashioned torturing or the guilty party.

"Could you just pull the tape off?" passed his lips.

I hung up. I was dealing with a man who never felt a kinship with the Furies such as I did at that moment.

The head of nursing, my next contact, was a little more sympathetic.

"Figure out whose locker it is, and I'll have a talk with him."

"A talk? You mean you'll rip their toenails out with a rusty pair of pliers?"

"I think my pliers are all stainless, Ian. We'll see."

Now that I had my source of righteous vengeance, all I needed was a target.

Laying in wait, hidden in the depths of the hospital, was Ernest. Ernest should be sympathetic to me, as a fellow paper-pusher caught somewhere in the middle of scalpel-wielders and minimum-wage labor. Alas, he's been at his job too long. He'd spent years of keeping records of which patient is sleeping in which room, how many cases of chamber pots had been delivered to the rehab floor, and yes, which locker had been assigned to which staffer. You put a man in an office alone for enough years with nothing to do but tally down names and numbers, and he goes a bit weird. And from what I heard, Ernest came in a little more than halfway to weird.
His office was in the bowels of the hospital, far from anywhere a human being might willingly roam. It was dimly-lit, which kept you from clearly seeing the faded motivational posters left there by his predecessor. His desk was filled with stacks and stacks of books containing the whereabouts of pretty much everything in the hospital, and a phone. No computer: he didn't trust 'em. No items reflecting a personal life, perhaps because he didn't have one. No blotter to write his appointments on, because who would ever want to make an appointment with Ernest?
There was also a funk in the room. Not that Ernest didn't shower, but the scent of failure about the place. Ernest kept records, but he had a reputation for not sharing them. This was a place where hopes of finding out the information in those records came to die. I'd heard stories about people trying to get him to divulge the information he was required to keep, and none of them ended without tears.

"Ernest, I need to know who most recently was assigned a locker in the ER men's room."

"That's classified."

He didn't even take a breath. Denying information was this man's one soul purpose in life.

"Classified? This isn't like tax information, or psychiatric information, or somebody's underwear size. This is just a locker."

"It's protected health information." Ernest pointed to a sign behind me, with a dancing purple hippo explaining the guarantees of HIPAA.

"That protects patient privacy... not..."

I stopped. I knew that going down this road would not lead to anything. More persuasive people than I had tried and failed this course.

I started again, "Wait.... I'm curious, why are you so possessive of these things? Do you not share them because you just don't bother to keep the damn records in the first place?"

Ernest's eyebrows shot up. He'd been accused of many things before, but I doubt anyone had ever outright accused the little troll of outright neglecting his job. His hand reached out and rested somewhat protectively atop a red binder towards the front of his desk. I saw it had "Locker Assignments" written in very small, very precise handwriting on a label stuck to the corner.

"How dare you?"

Silly Ernest, I dare plenty of things. One such thing, of course, is a little theft for a good cause. My hand shot out, I snatched the binder, and I booked it out of there before he could get around his desk. As I pounded down the bright and empty hallways back towards civilization, I felt the flush of victory spread throughout my chest. In my hands, the "No Ian" writer's identity was kept. Once I knew who it was, I could finally strike a blow back against one of the over-lording clinical staffers who dared to accuse me of having poor moral fiber.

I slipped into an unused room, wedging my foot against the door in case Ernest came hunting for his book.

I carefully opened the binder, and looked for the most recent assigned locker. Sure enough, it was marked as being in the men's bathroom in the ER.

The locker was signed out to a nurse, with the last name of Barton. Yes... Nolan Barton, you would soon be ...

Nolan?

I looked at the name written in Ernest's small precise hand... and then imagined a sloppier hand mistakenly leaving a little bit more space between the O and the L than the other letters.

Yeah.

Write it out yourself, it was an easy mistake for anyone to make.

Christ.

I crept back to Ernest's office, and leaned the binder up against the closed door as quietly as I could, and then snuck back to my post in the ER. As it turned out, Nolan had just started that day, and was a funny and engaging guy, despite being Canadian. The rest of the night went wonderfully.

If Ernest finds out that the head of nursing doesn't mind wielding a pair of toenail pliers for a good cause though, I'm fucked.

Labels: Guest columns, meta-fiction