It’s Sparrow…An average man passing an average life.
Thursday, July 29
Back At GHSD
We worked with the new kid Dylan tonite at the General Hospital Security Department (GHSD), and it was his first shift on his own…When we got there (two hours before he did) we asked about him, and both Travis and Alisha gave him good marks, with Alisha noting – not for the first time – that he was overqualified, which was funny because this is not a tuff job to be overqualified for…Heck, if you have a pulse and can look good in a uniform, you’re already qualified, and if you can get thru the interview without drooling, you’re in…Anything else, like judgment and keeping your wits about you, is a bonus.
(It would turn out that Dylan may well be overqualified…He did a variety of things in the Chair Force, including security for nuclear weapons transport, and we strongly suspect that if you can ensure safe delivery of a nuke, you can probably handle unlock tour without too much difficulty.)
Dylan is older than he looks…He did ten years in the Air Force and was let go because of injuries…He has a 100% VA disability rating, and he has a wife who’s working to be an EMT/firefighter, and he has a 6-year-old daughter, too, which is almost interesting because he barely looks old enuff to vote.
We didn’t steal money tonite, but the nite wasn’t all that taxing, either…Right off the bat, at 2300 Wednesday nite (Thursday for Diary purposes) a Facilities evolution replacing something or other somewhere or other was conducted…It meant that badge access to doors would be shut off…Or maybe not…And that the sliding ER doors would be down…Or maybe not…There were other scenarios, too, which no one was entirely certain of, so most everyone in Facilities was here…As it was, the ER sliding doors, both of them, went down, but it was a simple matter to keep the interior ones open, and yours truly resolutely stood post, ready to help any and all patients, but the repair only took 15 minutes, there was no one to help, and I spent the time eating snacks in a wheelchair.
But that was it…There were no patient watches, but we got the lowdown on the one from last nite, the one Hunter had asked me to come work on the nite off we were working at the hotel, because it turns out Dylan hasn’t yet completed tactics training, so he can’t do a patient watch on his own.
The guy was crackers, quoting the Bible and preaching to his imaginary flock, all while trying to leave the room and generally presenting a non-compliant nature…It might’ve been almost interesting to deal with him and enter his confused world because while we’re heathens now, we had 13 years of Lutheran schooling and can probably still work our way around a Bible…But we’re not here to annoy or peeve people, so maybe it’s best we never saw him.
There were more bears tonite…Dylan and yours truly happened to be on a parking lot patrol at the same time, and we met in a front parking lot, with Dylan shining as big a flashlight as we’ve seen in the trees.
– There are two cubs up there…
We looked around, somewhat anxiously, because cubs generally have a mommy somewhere nearby…Dylan didn’t think so, tho.
– They look pretty big…I think they’ve broken away from mama.
So in addition to ensuring safe transport of nuclear weapons, he’s a qualified forest ranger, too…The fly in the ointment was the tree they were in was pretty close to one of our scan points…We discussed this, with Dylan noting the cubs were unlikely to jump out of the tree to attack us, and yours truly, after considering the matter for a bit, went and scanned the tag without incident.
A Good Session
Today’s tai chi class with Tim was wonderful…We got there early, and he was with some kids, so we walked around the basketball court a few times and got some solid deep breathing in…When we got back to Room 2, Tim had some Chinese music going and was sitting on a rubber ball meditating…So we joined him…Then yours truly did a reading from the Tao Te Ching, which we both found rewarding, so we discussed that for a while, and it turns out Tim has 26 years of sobriety, which we didn’t know, tho he thought we did…He started tai chi after drinking himself out of the Navy – never particularly easy to do – and he’s one of the few tai chi/Tao practitioners we’ve met with strong religious beliefs, which is known as a Higher Power in AA and other 12-step rooms…But we agreed all spiritual disciplines lead to the same place: a life lived from the inside out, where you trust your instincts as opposed to always reacting to outside influences.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
0930 Thursday until 1630 Thursday…7.0 hours for the day and 36.0 hours for the week…Regular readers of this crap the first is a strong figure, while the second is merely OK.
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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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