A couple of my facebook friends posted this pic and I had a good chuckle. I then started thinking a little more deeply than I should have. I tend to do that. It ruins a perfectly good joke. It occurred to me that there are a lot of girls who aren't little any more STILL trying to save fish from drowning. The Alberta Health Services building complex where I work is full of them. Last weekend there was a meeting on Saturday in which 10 people, (all women), who had recently been operated on met to discuss their experiences and make suggestions. They were almost all fairly old and one even needed a walker. But they were buzzing like school girls with that post-performance actor afterglow when they were let out. I asked one of them how the meeting had gone and she was all too happy to tell me! "It is just fabulous! Only AHS does this! Talking to surgery patients and asking for suggestions. Because I made a suggestion I have already changed the way they do things in the hospitals! It's so nice to get results!"
I didn't ask what rule she had changed and she didn't tell me. It didn't seem to be what she was so excited about. Making the change and forever being associated with it was what got her tired heart thumping that day. It could very well have been something well thought out and necessary and for all we know it could save some people's lives. Like a rule that requires surgeons to take off their watches before operating because maybe she had heard some post-op ticking inside her after her surgery. It's a silly example but possible. It's also possible, and I see this so often in governmental agencies in Canada like AHS, it's possible that maybe these were 10 ladies with good intentions, trying to help people, but just creating more and more rules and regulations that bog down the entire medical procedures they are hoping to improve, thereby accomplishing the exact opposite of what they were attempting. Like the girl in the pic, they are trying to save fish from drowning.
Maybe, and I'm just gonna blue sky this, maybe while they were drinking Tim Horton's coffee and picking at their fruit plate, scones and finger sandwiches, maybe it was decreed that doctors henceforwardly must all get certified in hand washing, Foodsafe and Toastmasters before they are allowed to practice. Hand washing is a must, and don't think I'm joking here, there really IS a course and you really DO get a certificate upon completion to frame and hang on your wall somewhere fairly high up or surrounded by many other certificates so that people might not be so inclined to actually read it. The Foodsafe, well to deal with "meat" in a sanitary way. Cutting a spleen is surprisingly similar to cutting a ham hock and they are both veritable petri dishes of bacteria! Toastmasters? Bedside manor. There is just no substitute to the healing process for an upbeat, kind, good-looking, well-dressed, spicy-smelling member of the medical profession at your side to inform you of how well the procedure went. Even if it didn't go so well, it certainly hastens along the placebo effect to have a confident, clearly speaking, professional-appearing doctor lying to you. Incidentally I just read an article, IN the AHS published health magazine I see at work all the time, that the placebo effect is actually MORE effective than it's ever been. I also recently watched the Star Wars series again because that's the colourful social life I'm rockin' here in Cowtown, and was reminded that Jedi mind tricks only work on the weak-minded. It has been said that the same goes for hypnotism and the placebo effect. And speaking of Alberta Health Services, coincidentally all three of these courses are offered by the busy, busy people at A.H.S.
I say "busy", TWICE, because it seems to me that there is a newly commonplace kind of business here in my home and native land that went nuclear whilst I was away, and it's best described as the business of busy-ness. That is, here in Canada, there are a lot of extra steps taken, previously understood to be unnecessary, that are mandatory before a person can do, (fake "well"), ANYthing! As I have said many times since returning, and only slightly hyperbolically, "You need a certificate to take a crap around here!" And I have also said before that it appears as though these extra steps in licencing, upgrading, complete re-educating, might have been implemented just as much to keep some people employed coming up with this extra, "busy-ness" and enforcing it, as to help with the process they are supposed to be helping. Getting back to the group of ladies on Saturday, one of them commented during one of the group's mandatory 10-minute breaks, that I must surely get a little bored doing what I was doing. To be fair, yes, a Saturday is a little dull around there because usually we don't have a group of 10 ladies who need to have me as door opener, door holder, escorter to the meeting room or washroom, lunchtime food deliverer and basic be at their beck and call-er. "What is your phone number here so we can call you if we need something?" she asks taking out her phone to punch in the number. I tell her that I cannot be reached directly but give her the number of dispatch who can be called so that they can radio me and get me to return to my desk and meet with them. After all I have patrols to do, boilers to check, reports to write and other things that can take me away from my desk and their service. She got a look on her face of someone who might just call a meeting to streamline THIS particular procedure so that OTHER people need not be inconvenienced in future by security keeping the place secure. She says to me, "With so much time on your hands, you really should be taking online courses!" I came this close |_ _ _ _| to saying, "Well why don't you call another meeting so that you and your girlfriends can make it mandatory for me to do just that?" You see, while it may appear that I am just sitting at my desk, every time I am there I am monitoring the security cams. And it actually happened, right around the time these 10 ladies were intermittently arriving for their meeting, that I saw a group of folks that were known to me from previous encounters on the site and C-Train during which I had seen them being obnoxious and conducting themselves in such a way that other people were endangered or at the very least bothered. But in their defence, always with pleasantly minty fresh breath. Three dudes and one chick, every time I had seen them before they were sharing a bottle of mouthwash, completely pissed, loud and up to no good. I saw them that Saturday on my camera making their ways across the site and, as always, sharing a bottle of mouthwash. I thought it was Listerine, the beverage of choice for hoodlums like these, but it turned out to be, "Equate." I had a good laugh at that!
People such as these are probably not SOLD mouthwash at the Superstore. Or snow shovels. But at the time our ladies were arriving I saw the group coming back across my site, one of them swinging a snow shovel around contributing to his already unsteady gait. This, I felt, needed my attention because they were approaching an area where there was no camera coverage and I wanted to make sure they left the premises without, I dunno, breaking a car window with the shovel or brandishing it at someone, quite possibly one of our group of 10 fish lifeguards. As I was leaving my building to maintain a visual on these yahoos, one of the group of ten stopped me. "I am wondering about parking around here. I am parked right there. I just don't want to return to my car and find a ticket on it." I had to curtly advise her, as I was trying to detach myself from the conversation, to, "Park anywhere you want." As I was walking brusquely away I saw two understanding contractors who said nothing, just nodded their understanding and belief that I might have something more important to tend to at this precise moment. I also heard, as the lady got to the locked doors, the same locked doors the contractors were waiting patiently outside of until I returned, "How am I supposed to get in? Hey come back here young man!" Or something like that. Security guard manners no doubt appeared on the minutes of the meeting.
Well the hoodlums went toward the Walmart without incident. What kind of Walmart munchies go best with Equate spearmint? As I got back to the main entrance to my building there were to two contractors and two of the ladies. One of the ladies was the member of the group with mobility issues so I had to open the door and hold it for her since the handicap entrance was locked as it always is on a Saturday. One of the other ladies chose that opportunity to give the disingenuous, "We're so very, very appreciative of all your hard work!" speech. She then taped up a piece of paper on the entrance which announced that the meeting was to the right in the cafeteria. I asked her, "Is your meeting in 1103, the education room, or is it in the cafeteria?" "No," she says, "It's WAAAY past the cafeteria in the boardroom. The big board room past the cafeteria on the left." Well the cafeteria is past room 1103 and past the doors that you can only get through with an access card. I would need to escort all the late arrivals, and since she was posting a sign, I was pretty sure there would be some and that they would not have access cards. Also, in my building it is quite the procedure you need to go through to post a sign on a door. On the entrance next to the one she had just slapped the sign on there was another one posted by the owners of the restaurant inside the main entrance. It was a notice to use the revolving door on cold days so that the staff wouldn't get a chill every time the regular door or handicap door was opened. I remember the owner had to talk to security who referred it to building owner Morguard representatives, who referred it to Morguard management, who probably referred it to a room full of fish resuscitators who gave it the okay, passed the word back to management, then back to me and I passed it to the owners of the restaurant. Two days it took before they could tape a piece of paper to the door. This lady was just hanging her sign up all willy nilly without following proper protocol. But I decided to allow it since it was a Saturday. I DID tell her to make sure she takes it down at the end of the day. She informed me there was another one on the main entrance of the other building I guard but that she would take them both down before going home. I THEN decided I had better find out what room they were in. You see I need to know how many there will be and where they are for fire safety reasons. If there is a fire alarm I need to evacuate them and special priority would need to be shown to anyone with mobility issues. This is why I had told the organizers of the meeting to all sign the after hours guest book on my desk so I'll know who and where they are. Only two of them had signed it and neither had put the correct room number in the space for the room number. Had they gone through the proper channels to book a room on a Saturday at an A.H.S. facility it would have taken a week or so of meetings to arrange but Morguard would have been informed and I would have been informed via the security memo book AND I likely would have received the correct room number and a list of guest names. But because of the bureaucracy-heavy system that IS our A.H.S. it is not an easy thing to book a room and when it is done, there are so precious few who know about it. This usually does NOT include reception or security. So there's no guarantee we'd have been better off even if they HAD booked the meeting properly. So, I went with her to the room they were in which was in her description some board room way past the cafeteria on the left that was definitely NOT room 1103 the education room. I apologized to the very patient contractors, who were there to do something far less important like clean the air purifiers or something like that and walked with this lady to find out what room their meeting was in. It was 1103 the education room and as I said something like, "So it IS in 1103," she overvolumed me with, "SEE? THIS IS THE BOARDROOM WE ARE IN!" What good would it have done to argue? I didn't bother and even if I didn't have people waiting at my desk, don't think I would have. THIS is often how these people get the results they get.
When I returned to the contractors and finally signed them in and gave them the access they needed to do their jobs, they said something like, "It looks like you're having fun today!" Then we exchanged knowing headshakes much like the understanding looks these two guys gave me when I was chasing the shovelling garglers down the street. I said, "How much do you want to bet she doesn't take those signs down at the end of the day?" Unfortunately the contractors were both gone before the fish-whisperers left or they would have known that I won that bet.
Now to address the possibility that you think I might be harshly overgeneralizing and disparaging the fine women of Canada: all I can say is, "busybody" is a term rarely applied to men. I know, I know, all Canadian women aren't like this but if I hadn't put my finger on it before this incident, I was, after Saturday, even more confident that the palpable difference in my country since coming back to it was a distinctly female difference almost as if a manipulative mother or an overbearing girlfriend or a gossipy goose were in charge of it. Every day I work at A.H.S. headquarters where one in every 20 or 30 employees is a dude and they are making an art form of busying themselves doing practically nothing. They are responsible for many good ideas but just as many overly intrusive brainstorms that make people want to say, "Just mind your own business!" I could change jobs but one area that is even WORSE is the education system in Canada where fishy rules and regulations have mandated constant upgrading and certificate buying that force one to take time off teaching to get better at teaching. So what am I to do? To maintain the metaphor I suppose I'll just have to swim with the rest of this school of fish. Don't want to go against the flow. Holy mackerel, that wouldn't please the carping critics! Walleye bass be going. Sushi ya later. Ugh...
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