Double Flee A

just pretend I'm deaf

I listen to an mp3 player at my job, during the portion of which I'm walking around the hospital putting drugs in the pyxis machines. On my mp3 player I listen not so much to music, because for that all you need is a radio, but to people talking. Thanks to podcasting, there is more easy-to-get decent audio than you can ever listen to, so I'll download and copy it over, and I've got something to listen to that will hopefully be interesting. Whatever it is, it's going to be more interesting than what I would otherwise hear, which is the sounds of firing solenoids and plastic clicking against other plastic.

There are three kinds of nurses here, the ones who don't talk to you, the ones who talk to you when you're not wearing headphones, and the ones who talk to you when you are wearing headphones.

The first group and I have nothing to talk about, which is fine. The second group is pleasant enough, just talkers who are also bored with what they're doing, and are looking to supplement their imaginations with a few moments of repartee. The third group I want to strangle. They talk to you specifically because they think you can't hear them, and invariably with a passive aggression that, if it had a ph, would disintegrate ceramic tile. They mean to draw their own attention to that they are being ignored, by someone who should be listening to them but "Oh, isn't, and hmm." Then they spin calculatedly away and toddle off, presumably to catch up on some other bits of nastiness they've got to attend to.

I don't like working with women, precisely for this reason; I sense an unreconstructed social heirarchy is at work, and that I'm having my eyes pecked at by the head chicken. I gather their gesture is meant to wither me into some kind of shame, but all it does is make me shake my head at the smallness of the life of anyone who could possibly take pleasure in such a useless form of exceedingly weak cruelty.

posted by dale @ 1:36 PM