It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Thursday, July 25
We have to be the only people who can wake up at 0230 and consider ourselves to have overslept…We were scrambling…We got to the gym, where he had good strength and efficiency…Then we had to get the morning’s project work done, starting from scratch, then we had to get ready to head into the hospital…Bandit also demanded cuddles before we left…This is a stark contrast from the cat, whose deepest emotion sometimes seemed to be tolerance, tho she would permit you to pet her occasionally.
Phil put off our morning exterior patrol for a while because Nuclear Medicine usually gets a delivery on Thursday mornings and he wanted to be here for it…(Nuclear medicine uses radioactive elements to diagnose and treat assorted ailments…I looked it up.)..It never came, tho, which disrupted Phil’s routine and didn’t please him.
When we finally got started, he asked how my boots were, and, somewhat flummoxed, we said uh, fine, and he suggested we work our way down the side of a small hill so we could start at the loading dock…Fuck that noise, as we used to say in the Nav…More Official Navy Phraseology: not only no, but bleep no, because everyone reading this should be able to reckon the odds of yours truly making it down a slope on his feet is, at best, 50/50…On a good day…Throw in passing clouds and BOOM the odds are lowered to 20/80 …So we vetoed that idea, obliging us to walk down the parking lot and walk down the hill, something we were able to navigate safely.
During patrol – which ended up uneventful – we came across Tim, the radiologist who would’ve taken the nuke medicine delivery…He appeared to be out for a stroll and when Phil queried him on the matter, Tim advised the guy came before we had assumed the watch…Phil took this news in stride.
The Security Office (SO) is located in the ER lobby and we have a clear view of the admissions desk and today it was manned by a young lady named Carrie…It turns out her brother is an Olympian in Paris and the family’s heading out next week to watch…She looks pretty athletic herself and we asked if she was an athlete, too, and she said she played tennis in high school and was good, but declined to play in college and we got the impression she regretted that…Some information aggregation revealed the family is from Georgia and she has a master’s in hospital administration, which left us to wonder if any of my new female coworkers are aggregating information on me.
It was a slow day…Michael came in for some training…Actually, at first, he was in an online meeting that sounded as tedious as any county government or VA meeting…He did report that the biggest security trend in the facility was verbal harassment of staff by irate patients and, as likely as not, their families.
It was so slow today the security cell rang all of one time…It was around noon, Phil was off at lunch, and Michael and I were doing some training in the SO…Michael answered; it was a telemarketer…Michael advised they had called a hospital security department and to take our number off their list…The security phone regularly gets spam calls and Michael is way more polite than Phil is.
Bandit is learning when we’re coming home and this afternoon he met me in kitchen for the first time…So we’re making progress…Recall the first time we came home from the hotel he was hiding under the bed, and the past couple of times he would trot in from either the living room or the bedroom after we walked in…Bandit still ignores the canned food we’ve put out, but he regularly eats the dry food.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1830 Wednesday until 0130 Thursday…7.0 hours for the nite and 31.5 hours for the week.
Considering the complete and utter tumult the second job has thrown our sleep routine into, the numbers aren’t too bad this week.
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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.
Coming soon! Gaylon’s books in actual book form!
