Scenes From Entrance #2

I suppose I'm doing this backwards, chronologically speaking, but, with the way these entries post to Blogger, a random, casual reader will read them in some semblance of the right order. This is on my mind right now; I'll get to my "career" ethos in a later post.

With about a month at this new job under my belt, a few thoughts have settled in, and I feel a need to share them. Go get an alcoholic beverage; you may wish you didn't spend time in my brain. The break below this paragraph can last for decades.

I think it's official: I'm a people person. Fourteen years ago I can pretty confidently say I was not. When I took the job at Directions AV, Inc., I was pretty vexed at my agreeing to approach strangers with a video camera and encourage/cajole/plead for their participation in videos as a requirement of my job. But approach them I did and, if I have to say so myself, I became pretty damn good at putting together sight gags and short skits with no scripts and with randomly chosen non-actors. The unexpected by-product of that eight-years-and-change experience is that I can now approach and talk to just about everyone and be my wacky self as though I've known them for years.

Laid off in 2009, and feeling a little desperate after five idle months, I took what I now realize with clear 20/20-hindsight was an ill-advised taxi driving occupation. Despite the money-, time-, and mind-draining aspect of it, I also realize that it further developed my people-person skills. It is in the taxi that I actually realized that I can talk to just about anyone like an old buddy.

The taxi was killing me slowly, and I knew I had to get out, so I did that in July, accepting an offer at an imaging company as a school portraits photographer. There I realized that I can talk to almost anybody. Kids? Not so much. Honestly, it wasn't the talking that I had a problem with; it was the tolerating. Plus, all of the things I mentioned in the prior post.

In the preliminaries to being offered this job, the interviewer — who happens to be the owner of the company — seemed very pleased with my professed people-person skills that carried over from the taxi business. It may be the only reason they hired an old fart like me for a job where they expect their people to run to retrieve the parked cars.

But I digress. In the four and a half weeks that I have been functioning as a valet/parking attendant at this local hospital, I have greeted and welcomed already several hundreds of people. Some of them are repeat visitors, and others are one-timers. It is the repeat visitors who I think about the most. Some aren't visitors at all, but employees of the hospital. They're not our customers, but we are expected to treat them with the same respect and enthusiasm with which we treat the visitors, and enthusiasm is what I have felt since the start. Inside the building, beyond the doors where I am stationed, many of our repeat guests come in for surgery, and some come in daily for various and sundry cancer treatments. Some surgery patients are in and out in a couple of hours, while some go in and spend days in recovery. Cancer patients come in for chemotherapy, radiation, and even laser excision of cancerous skin cells. One gentleman, apparently in his fifties, arrives so precisely every morning that you could set your watch by him: 6:55. One woman was a regular visitor for my first three weeks, and she gleefully told me one Friday that it was her last day of treatment. Another lady — to whom I refer as "the lottery lady" — comes in every morning wearing her fleece skull cap (it's cold outside ...and she's bald!) announcing which day of her treatment today is, and how many days of treatment she has left. It's those numbers she plays in the Illinois Lottery Pick Three or Pick Four game and delivers the ticket she bought for me: day nine of treatment with 19 more to go, so she plays 919; day 12 of treatment? She plays 1216 and brings me a ticket. Today I was a winner, only not in the Lottery. She brought in for me and for my door coworker each a miniature holiday Bundt cake.

Some are very old, some are very young. Some have been preparing for surgery for weeks, while some were admitted under urgent circumstances. I see family members escaping from soulless waiting rooms to the cold freedom of fresh, outdoor air and a cigarette; some quietly shed tears of stress or worry while a loved one breathes upstairs with the aid of complicated electronics and machinery. I hand cancer patients their valet claim tickets and then enter their car and a cloud of lingering cigarette smoke, able when I park their car in the lot to escape the prison of their addiction that they cannot.

It dawned on me a few days ago, a sad realization, that probably half of these cancer patients will not survive that for which they are receiving treatment. The lady earlier mentioned who was so gleeful that she was finished with treatment told me practically in the same breath that, if the treatment doesn't prove successful, she could be looking at hospice in a matter of a few weeks; this was her last hurrah, her Hail Mary pass for big yards. Lottery Lady is happy to mention her forward progress, but she never volunteers how she's doing.

So much hope. So much fear. So much defiant dignity in the face of unpredictable odds, all in brief pauses between the entry vestibule doors.



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