EVS Journal 6
December 16, 2020

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made.”
–Rabbi Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

Another Hava Nagila incident in the OR today. Was playing it pretty loud on repeat, twirling my rag as they used to do back in my shtetl. Nineteen year old co-worker Ron goes, “Oh man, turn that Arabic shit off!” Arabic! 😂

Ron keeps ordering Alexa to stop, but she won’t listen. Once it starts,  there’s no stopping Hava Nagila. And if Alexa is on shuffle-repeat? We’re talking eternal musical recurrence. Either you love your fate, or you don’t. I do. Ron doesn’t. 

I’m celebrating the vicissitudes of fate when the Director of the OR walks in unannounced. She seems flustered, startled, even annoyed. I don’t know what she expected out of a cystoscopy turnaround in OR 1 by her crack EVS unit, but Employee #1027742 twirling a rag to Hava Nagila and pretending to be Tevye the Fiddler was perhaps not it.

I have the common sense (or unscrupulousness) to flee the scene. Urgent business awaits me in the adjoining scrub room–the business of not being yelled at–so I walk discreetly there, looking for trivial items I could plausibly be seeking, as she yells at everyone else for something I deliberately can’t hear. Hava Nagila keeps playing, so she has to yell over it. It’s funny but scary—scary in the “you’re all about to get fired over the hora” way. 

It’s too bad the boss isn’t Jewish, alas. She could use a couple hundred cc’s of Manischewitz Concord Grape IV push right now. Actually, so could I. 

When she’s about done yelling, I walk back insouciantly into the OR, self-importantly carrying a hazardous waste canister that suddenly seems useful. I walk over to Alexa, yank the plug out of the wall, and abruptly end the joys of Hava Nagila. The boss blathers on about something–some shit about “productivity”–then leaves, casting all of us into a gloomy silence. The guy doing the mopping misses a few spots. A garbage bin goes without a liner. A bed gets made crooked. 

Can’t we get anything straight? Maybe a change of music will help. But when Alexa goes on again, she reverts to playing Christmas carols. It doesn’t work. Try mopping a cysto room to “Silent Night” at 4 in the afternoon. Or wiping blood off the bed to “Little Drummer Boy.” Or handling canisters of medical waste to “Jingle Bell Rock.” Grotesque. To paraphrase the great Jewish philosopher Immanuel Kant, out of such crooked timbre as this, nothing straight can be made.  And the shift’s just begun.