Call Me

Posted on by under EVS Journal, Health Care Series

Scenes from Life On Call in the OR
EVS Journal 7

Every member of the OR EVS team takes emergency call on assigned weekends. The call shift starts at 8 am, ends at midnight, and takes place on two consecutive days. It’s an exercise in underpaid exhaustion. You get $5/hr every hour that you’re on call but not actively on a call. Once you get a call, you suit up (in scrubs) and punch in.  Once you suit up and punch in for a case, you get paid time and a half: $21/hr. When you’re done with the case, you punch out–you’re supposed to punch out–and go back to $5 an hour. Overtime past midnight is penalized, regardless of when the call comes in. Continue reading →

Secure Your Own Homeland

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Fatwas, libertarianism, slices of life

ICE showed up at my workplace today–or rather, ICE in the guise of DHS, “The Department of Homeland Security.” The agent flashed a badge and started asking about some people with Spanish names. Did I know anything about them? I had nothing to say.

The only thing I have for ICE or DHS–the only product I can promise–is wholehearted, undying hostility. I doubt they want to hear me talk about that. So there’s nothing to say. In any case, the Homeland they’re securing isn’t mine to worry about, and the land that I live in isn’t theirs to secure. Not a promising basis for a meeting of minds–the only kind that interests me.

I opened the door this time because I didn’t know who was ringing. Next time, as far as I’m concerned, they can stand there for as long as it takes to induce someone else to open the door. I’m not the doorman. So it won’t be me.

Those Drones Explained

Posted on by under Palestine, War with Iran

Zeynep Tufekci has a piece in The New York Times trying to explain the “drone panic” that has (supposedly) overtaken New Jersey. I live and work in central New Jersey, and have neither seen any drones nor encountered any panic, but am only too happy to borrow the premise.

Tufekci attempts a couple of explanations for the drone panic (and the drones), but conspicuously fails to mention one of the most prominent ones out there. About a week ago, South Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew vehemently suggested that the drones had been launched by an Iranian mothership, the implication being that they were imminently about to attack us, and constituted a major national security threat. He cited no real evidence for his claims, accused the Pentagon of covering up the threat, doubled down for awhile, and then retracted the whole thing. Van Drew is a standard-issue right-wing imbecile, but the explanation for making such claims is obvious. It’s called a guilty conscience. A belatedly guilty conscience.
Continue reading →

The Crooked Timbre of Humanity

Posted on by under EVS Journal, Health Care Series, slices of life

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. Continue reading →

Fiddlers in the OR

Posted on by under EVS Journal, Health Care Series, slices of life

I started an “EVS Journal” back in 2020, when I worked in environmental services in the operating room of a small community hospital in west-central New Jersey. I’ve decided to start posting edited versions of them here, for whatever interest they might still have. 

EVS Journal #5
December 15, 2020

Seth, Bilal, and I are doing a late turnover in OR 2. Alexa is playing Christmas carols. I get annoyed.

“Two Muslims and a Jew in here, and we’re listening to Christmas carols. Why?”

Without a word or reaction, Seth commands Alexa to play “Hava Nagila.”

“That’s better,” I say.

“I hate this fucking song,” Seth rejoins. Hava Nagila continues. Continue reading →

UHC, Denials, and Wrongful Death Revisited

Posted on by under EVS Journal, Health Care Series, moralism

The questions you ask determine the answers you get. If you ask the right questions, you have some hope of reaching the right answers. If you ask the wrong ones, you’ll likely reach the wrong answers. If you give up on asking, you get nothing but what you started with, so that if you begin in ignorance, you end there.

The debate about the killing of Brian Thompson threatens to begin and end either in misdirection or reinforced ignorance or both. Stuck between two competing brands of outrage–one exulting in Thompson’s death, the other outraged at the exultation–we’re in danger of losing the denials/reimbursement plot altogether. I know I’ve posted on this issue already, but think I’ve found a better way of saying what I was trying to say in that post, one that does a better job of asking the right questions than my last post did.* So here is UHC, Denials, and Death, Take 2. Continue reading →

Divestment at Yale

Posted on by under activism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Well, they say it’s kinda frightenin’
How this younger generation swings
You know it’s more than just some new sensation
Well, the kid is into losin’ sleep
And he don’t come home for half the week
You know it’s more than just an aggravation
–Van Halen, “And the Cradle Will Rock…”

Yale Daily News, December 8:

Yale students overwhelmingly pass divestment referendum

The Yale College Council announced today that the student body has passed the divestment referendum by a large margin.

Continue reading →

Bienvenidos a la Resistencia

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, liberty and the left, slices of life

Witherspoon Presbyterian Church
Princeton, New Jersey

I joined the Defensa del Barrio committee yesterday of my local Resistencia chapter–in “defense of the neighborhood,” also known by its slogan, ICE Out of Princeton. It reminds me that when I was in fifth grade, I wrote a short story in which my friends and I were forced to some woodland redoubt just outside of town, to organize resistance to hostile forces that had somehow taken over. I guess the adults had dropped the ball, leaving the defense of the town in our hands. I don’t remember who the hostile forces in my story were, or what we ended up doing about them. I just find myself wondering whether the story was coincidence or prescience.

Continue reading →