Monday, December 27, 2010

My Precious

Back when I worked in the Big City ED, we had a nurse named Bob. Now I'm sure Bob was a perfectly wonderful human being, but he was not a great ER nurse. Bob didn't like commotion. He didn't like multi-tasking. He was no fan of confrontation. More than anything else though, Bob hated, and I mean truly and completely despised, when someone moved his charts.

Finding a chart lying on the counter rather than stacked neatly in the rack put Bob over the edge, so much so that he once famously kidnapped all the charts, relocating them to the med room and hiding them among the lidocaine vials behind the safety of a locked door. Any attempts to access the abducted charts by another member of the team was rebuked. There, safe from greedy grubby hands grabbing his precious charts, Bob remained holed up to jealously document on his well-organized beauties. (His tenure in the ED was short.)

Sitting around the Christmas tree this weekend, I was reminded of this humorous episode by noticing the same possessive leer in the eyes of one of my younger cousins. Still a few years shy of truly appreciating the whole "giving is better than receiving" tenet of the season, the little rascal wolfishly gathered his presents from under the tree and arranged them in a neat pile at his feet. Positioned out of reach from the rest of the family, he was poised to start shredding the wrapping paper at the earliest acceptable moment.

Recognizing that look which screamed "Mine!" and smiling, I hoped at that moment my cousin would never choose a career as an ER nurse.

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