If you’ve read my book, Random Thoughts: A Writer’s Notebook, you know I was employed as a hospital orderly in Meriden, Connecticut, from mid-1972 to mid-1974. I worked the first shift, which was 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. My duties consisted of lifting and transporting patients, taking bodies to the morgue, occasionally assisting with autopsies on those bodies, helping funeral directors remove those bodies and others from the morgue, and providing aid to nurses (all of whom were female in those dark, oppressively paternalistic, binary days) with manual tasks for which they didn’t have the strength.
Should the second-shift orderly call in sick, I’d be called on to work a double, which meant I’d be on duty until 11:00 p.m. One of the duties of a second-shift orderly was to make sure male patients who’d undergone some surgical procedure or other and were due to be discharged the following day were able to void (our clinical term for urinate) on their own. After helping said gentlemen to the bathroom, one of the tricks we learned to facilitate their voiding was to turn on the water in the sink. As soon as they heard the sound of the running water, they couldn’t resist the urge to join in the fun.
Fast forward almost three decades: In 2000, I was hired to be the Director of Public Relations at an advertising and PR agency in Avon, Connecticut. At one point during my four-year tenure there, two things happened: First, I was given an office on the first floor of the building. The walls on the east and west sides of the office were solid. The wall on the north side of the office contained windows overlooking the parking lot and Connecticut Route 44. The wall on the south side of the office was only solid about a third of the way up from the floor. The rest was glass, facing the space between my office and the lavatory on the other side of that space.
Second, the agency hired a new Director of New Business. His name was Lewis Kelly. Lewis was one of those people you knew would be dangerous if he ever got to be as cool as he thought he was. On his first day of work at the agency, he was busily appointing his office, which was two doors to the west of mine. He brought in all kinds of paraphernalia, tchotchkes, memorabilia, and accoutrements, each of which indicated exactly how cool he was, including a bookcase in the shape of a rowboat stood on its end. The last thing he brought in was a fountain that recycled water through itself by means of an electric pump. I was sitting in his office chatting with him as he set up the fountain.
At one point, I said, “Lewis, you do know, of course, that if you run that fountain all day, you’re going to spend a sizable chunk of your days whizzing.”
“No, I’m not,” he said in his eminently cool manner.
All I said as I got up to leave was, “Okay.”
Within six months, I’d watched him beat a path in the carpet between his office and the lavatory.
He never figured out he should sacrifice a portion of his cool and turn off the fountain. The carpet was replaced, and so was Lewis.
Lewis was always ready to go.
Originally Published on https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/category/lifecolumns/notes-to-self/
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