It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Thursday, July 17
The Night At GHSD
Colby and ol’ Sparrow were busy tonite at the General Hospital Security Department (GHSD)…Leading off was Facilities farting around with the backup electrical system…Facilities Chief Eli (FCE) was there and we ran into him while on our first patrol and he described what was going on in excruciating detail…We are not Mr Electricity, and almost immediately we were showing Eli a palm; we had some zero clue what he was talking about…We asked him to big-picture us and he laffed and said anything plugged into a red outlet would be affected…In a hospital, this is a lot of things – vital things – in case the main power went tits up, and no small amount of coordination was called for…Eli said the whole process shouldn’t take longer than 15 minutes, and privately he confided it shouldn’t take even five minutes…As it turned out, the whole process took three.
His briefing, however incomprehensible it was, gave us the chance to look authoritative without actually knowing what in the hell was going on, something yours truly excels at…We looked down and nodded our head solemnly while clutching our duty belt, and anyone watching us would presume we knew what in the hell Eli was talking about.
On The Injured List
The big news is Hunter is down…He did something to a foot or ankle and is now in a boot…Nobody had too many details, but Alisha said he should be out about six weeks or so…(Hunter was actually in this morning…He was in civilian clothes and had both a walking boot and – for even less mobility – crutches, because he said the boot “wasn’t for shit”…He said he should be out ten days, unless there’s ligament damage, then he’s “f*cked”.)
Be On Time
We worked with Colby tonite, and the big news he was on time…He seldom is…He was late last week when we worked graveyard, and he was 15 minutes late relieving me Wednesday morning when Hunter didn’t come in because of his foot…We’re surprised he’s still working here, frankly, but that is not our lookout.
Nature and circumstance sees to it we’re always on time…One, we dislike being late, a habit from having grown up Lutheran…Two, being early is an old habit from the sports officiating days…Three, we were fired from our very first job for being tardy…We were in high school and we hired on at an ice cream shop and we were a couple of minutes late for an after-school shift and were fired immediately…The old Asian lady paid me cash for my labors to date and that was that…That lesson has stayed with us, and we are seldom late for anything.
Work To Do
We had two helicopter assists, too, both almost back-to-back…The first one was the very rare incoming patient, flown in from a small town south of the next county, modestly interesting because they have a rather new hospital there…It was an older lady whose neck was immobilized and why she needed to be flown here and not the big city was interesting (I mean, they’re already in the air) but way beyond my paygrade…Later, a guy in the ER with a humongous patch on his right eye was flown to the big city.
No Game Today
We missed the gym today…For reasons we are unable to explain, we didn’t get to sleep until early afternoon…At least we think we didn’t sleep…We don’t recall dreaming, but neither do we recall tossing and turning and wondering why the hell we’re still up…At 1330 we texted Tim and said we wouldn’t make today’s tai chi class.
We do remember some dreams, tho, including our last one, which saw us at a women’s golf tournament…No, we have some zero clue where this came from either…Regular and longtime readers of this crap know we’re not golfers, nor do we spend a whole lot of time fantasizing about athletic women…
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
1330 Thursday until 1830 Thursday…5.0 hours for the day – a depressing total – and 36.5 hours for the week, which regular readers of this crap know is a pretty solid weekly total.
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The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
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