Territory

Every work place has at least one person whose mode of discourse is permanently fixed at "complain or criticize as vociferously as possible." Often such individuals strike others as abrasive, unpleasant, irksome, or downright exhausting. Everything that comes out of their mouths is waah, waah, waah. They seem incapable of speaking in any other way.

I walked into the lounge when one such person was holding the fridge door open and accusing the housekeeping staff (in their absence) of consuming some leftover sandwiches that a couple of the surgeons had ordered for those who help out in the O.R.

Now, the fact that the sandwiches were no longer in the fridge could have been due to a number of things - hungry anesthesiologists or surgical house officers on call, disposal by someone concerned about old food in the fridge, nurses on break between weekend cases, etc. But this woman had it in her head that the housekeeping staff had taken the sandwiches, and the two others in the lounge who were discussing the issue with her were more than happy to accept her conclusion as gospel.

For at least five minutes they went on and on and on about how the O.R. wasn't truly a locked unit, anybody could get in, the housekeeping staff had surely gone in and helped themselves, blah, blah-blah, blah-blah. Back and forth, back and forth, complaints and criticisms, complaints and criticisms.

Then there was a brief lull. One of them took another bite of her salad. Another looked in the cupboards for sugar for her coffee. The third looked out the window.

I probably shouldn't have intruded into the conversation, but it was a small lounge, and their words were swirling around me like angry little gnats, and there was something I wasn't quite understanding. So when this pause in the diatribe came, I took a sip of my coffee and asked, "But why shouldn't they be included?"

All three heads turned toward me. What was that look on their faces - incredulity? Lack of comprehension? Annoyance that I had opened my mouth?

Finally one of them retorted, "The housekeeping staff?"

"Yeah," I said, taking another sip of my coffee.

"The whole housekeeping staff for the whole hospital?"

"You're saying the whole staff came here over the weekend?"

"Yeah. They have their meetings in this room."

"Okay, but why shouldn't they be included?" I repeated. "They do all the work in this hospital that no one else wants to do."

Just a few days ago when I arrived at the hospital I came across a man in uniform on his hands and knees scrubbing the floor around the toilet in one of the small lobby bathrooms. Clearly someone had had some kind of unpleasant accident or something. Who was going to thank him when he was done having his hands and face in someone else's excrement so someone else wouldn't have to be confronted with it?

The three women in the lounge stared at me for a second, then returned to their lunches in silence. When I left the room with my coffee they were still sitting there not saying a word. I would really have liked to know their answer to my question.