Packratting

I’m a terrible packrat when it comes to pictures I’ve taken or words I’ve committed to paper (or email or fax). For instance, I have more than 35,000 pictures stored on Flickr, a notebook full of copies of letters I’ve sent to one old friend, still MORE notebooks full of printed-out email “conversations” with people. This may strike people who’ve grown up with computers as a huge waste of time, and I suppose it probably is (well, except that technology has a bad habit of replacing itself every so often; whatever words I saved on 5-¼” floppy disks, for instance, would be lost forever had I not also printed them out, and the same can be said for whatever I saved on my old Smith-Corona word processor. Paper takes up space, and takes time, but at least it is more or less “permanent”).

Going through some of that today I came across a letter I’d written to a former boss about 16 years ago, part of which I’ll reproduce here just for chuckles, grins, and because it may show some of the roots of my “99-percentness” (which of course is not a word). (Names of specific people and the institution for which we worked are changed).

One of the hospital’s ubiquitous vice-presidents came by PCC yesterday to give a brief presentation on our “Mission Statement” and “Strategic Plan.” She talked of downsizing, reduction by 20-25% of FTEs and so forth, cross-training remaining workers so that they can be moved hither, thither and yon, wherever the work happens to be on any given day. Robert, your ever-so-shy former secretary, had the temerity to ask how the hospital’s administrator-to-worker ratio compared with that of other hospitals. “We have a CEO, COO, executive vice-presidents, senior vice-presidents, administrative chief of staff (whatever HE is), vice-presidents. For two years we’ve heard nothing but 'do more with less,' yet you bring in a whole herd of administrators to tell us how to do it.” Barb--the VP--blushed and admitted that, yes, our hospital has more administrators than the average hospital.

She also talked about “outsourcing” certain services, like food services and housekeeping. After the meeting I took her into the hall and showed her the stained carpet. “This is subcontracted housekeeping,” I said. “What I would ask, as a customer, is, ‘if you can’t keep your carpet cleaned, how are you going to do all the fancy stuff you brag about?’” Barb admitted I had a point.

Listening to Barb chatter on about the hospital’s “vision” and where it wants to go in the next few years, I found myself imagining a huge beehive full of interchangeable “worker bees” completely devoid of individuality, all hustling and bustling noiselessly in service to some sequestered queen. This is not the first time that image has appeared in my mind; I see it whenever I listen to Steve at one of our office coordinators’ meetings, too, especially when he talks about “leveling the playing field,” which basically means reducing every support job in the hospital to the least common denominator, thereby allowing us to hire nothing but Secretary 1’s at right around minimum wage. The ultimate purpose is to reduce us all to the point of easy expendability.

I’m not a complete idiot or idealist--I KNOW that we are all expendable, as inherently worthless as a Confederate dollar or a politician’s promise. Nevertheless, that the hospital’s administration has decided, apparently, that it is perfectly okay, even preferable, to slap us in the face with that knowledge every day, while at the same time telling us how “important” we are, is disconcerting, at best.

I should have become a plumber (NOT one of Nixon’s).

In retrospect, I wrote that particular letter at about halfway through the 31 years since Reagan’s election and maybe even about halfway into the “housing bubble,” the stock market’s “irrational exuberance,” etc., all the bad banking practices (or outright thievery) that nearly collapsed the world financial system a couple of years ago. Nostradamus I am not, but, like some kind of weird coal-mine canary, I think I--and a lot of others--sensed the shitstorm about to crash down around us, even if we couldn’t describe it with anything more than, “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.”

If I were going to dress up for Halloween today, I think I would go as a vampire (speaking of coal-mine canaries, isn’t the recent popularity of vampires a neat coincidence or something? Maybe there are a LOT of coal-mine canaries out there) with a big Goldman-Sachs or Wells Fargo logo on my back, or maybe a photo of our congressmen/women clustered around a TV, guzzling Dom Perignon and laughing at OWS people being tear-gassed.