Pride goes before a fall.  Hubris is met inexorably by Nemesis.
 
Considering the number of times I have fallen flat on my face, you would think that I should have learned that by now. 

This little gem is not written for any one of you in particular.  It is solely intended as a personal reminder for the royal "we", me and myself. 

For you younguns out there, should your moccasins happen to be a little worn, try them on for size.

This morning I was reading the September 5, 2005 issue of Fortune, not a magazine that I often read.  In there was a first person article, which caught my eye.  It was entitled “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” delivered as a Commencement Address in June this year at Stanford University by Steve Jobs. 

As a college drop out, Jobs founded Apple in his parent’s garage when he was 20, but was ousted from his own company when he was 30.  Almost a generation later, he returned to Apple to eventually give us the I-mac, and the I-pod.

In his speech, he offered in essence, three lessons:

1.     “Learn to connect the dots – Place your trust in your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

2.     Love and Loss – The only way to do great work is to love what you do.  If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.  Don’t settle.

3.     A lesson before dying – Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.  Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.  Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.  And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."

My name is not Steve Jobs, and neither is yours.  But it would not hurt for us to “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.”  

The phone rang.  You picked it up, and answered with your usual cheery, enthused, diplomatic, courteous, deadpan voice, “City Morgue, Undertaker Doe speaking, how may I be of assistance?”

“This is Doktor Upperyouass.  I was reading in Scientific American about this new treatment regimen.  What can you tell me, in this Age of Aquarius, when the Moon is in the Seventh Sun, about Mycoxaflin in combination with Vipercillin in the treatment of the dreaded Fungusamongus?  And while you are at it, can you tell me the nephrotoxicity profiles of both drugs, and how they may interact with the patient taking Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra?”

Now, blessed as you were with your lightning quick mind, you instantaneously reviewed what you had gleaned from the Stimulus-Pause-Response Theory.  You were just given a stimulus, and because you had been so well trained, you felt the necessity to develop a pause, before you responded.  It was in that pause, when humanity, your humanity, hung in the balance, during which all decisions, great or small, could be made.

Almost immediately, you came up with the one of the following best guesses: 

(a)     “What kind of numb nut are you, Doctor?  Upperya be your name!  If I knew the answers to your questions, would I be sitting where I am sitting?  Would I not rather be propping my feet up on my desk at some CDC cubicle, resting on my laurels, instead of being harassed by the likes of you an hour before midnight?

(b)    “Hey, Doc, you are barking up the wrong tree!  This is the City Morgue.  We deal with the grateful dead, and the nearly dead.  None of our rocket scientists here would know what you are talking about?  Are you sure you dial the right number?  Did you overdose yourself on Preparation H?  Or are you brain dead also?”

(c)     “Ahem… Anyone taking Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra at the same time would be having a serious problem.  He would be spending his time in the horizontal practically 24/7, hopefully not all by himself.  Fungusamongus would be the least of his concerns.  Just ask Irish-Red, and he would be more than happy to bring you up to speed!”

(d)    “Excuse me, Doctor, I am afeared that I do have the answers to your questions on the top of my head.  At this time of the evening, seeing that we are overloaded with dead bodies, our staffing does not allow for any detailed research to adequately answer your queries.  Surely, I don't expect me to blow smoke up your ass, do you?  Now, if you would call back in the morning, and ask to speak with our Clinical Supervisor, she would be overjoyed to answer all of your questions.  So take a hike, Bud!?”

Let just say, hypothetically, that my aging mother was admitted to your hospital.  A hundred years ago, her good doctor, plucking out of thin air, prescribed a certain brand of toilet paper for her to wipe her ass whenever she had the occasion to go to the potty.  Since then, she would only use this particular brand of toilet paper, from her nearby Mom and Pop Grocery Store down the street, made available for her by special order because she was such a wonderful customer.  Now that she was in your hospital, she wanted to use the same brand of toilet paper, because when she had tried all other brands and generic variants, they caused her to break out in a rash.  In your esteemed institution, you stocked “Don’t Squeeze the Charmin” and “White Cloud”, but those goodies were apparently not good enough.  So when you cared enough to offer the very best, not necessarily the very finest, you would bend over backwards to serve and please my mother, especially in light of the fact that the good doctor insisted, and you did not want to have your pants sued off by my aging mother for developing a rash as a result of using your store brands of toilet paper, would you not?

In the process of attempting procurement, you discovered that toilet papers were under the strict monitoring of the DEA (that’s the Drug Enforcement Agency to you sophisticated) for possible abuse, and they fell under the Controlled Substance Act.  So even if said toilet paper could be found, another hospital might be reluctant to lend you a hand, much less wipe your ass with it, considering the legality and paperwork involved.  Undaunted, you called at least a dozen hospitals in your greater metropolitan area anyway, all the way to Timbuctoo, looking to see if you could borrow this particular brand of toilet paper, because it was an emergency, didn’t you know?

So after a dozen phone calls, involving at least twice the number of people, including the good doctor, the nurse, you, the working stiff who was so fortunate as to receive the call in the first place, the department supervisor, the Clinical Coordinator, all the way to Mr. Big Himself, plus the string of other gofers and hanger-ons at the other institutions, plus the Mom and Pop Grocer, who was now closed, expending umpteenth man-hours all told, only to find that nowhere could this particular toilet paper be found!  As a result of this Herculean effort, you called the charge nurse back, who called the doctor, who then tried to explain to my mother why she should have to develop a rash after she had to go, instead of suing the pants off of her doctor and your hospital.

Incidentally, my mother would only gum on properly aged Kobe Beef, imported from Japan, so never mind bringing her Black Angus Filet, USDA Choice New York Strip, Prime Ribs, T-Bone, Porter House, or the holy terror known as London Broil.  Now if she could not have that particular aged piece of Kobe beef, she would become constipated, she could not go to the potty, her eyes would become so jaundiced because her shit would be oozing out of her sockets and other orifices, she was liable to sue your pants off again, for medical malpractice, for lack of proper medical care, and blatant disregard for patient safety, her safety.

My mother, I took your name in vain in order to protect the innocent as well as the guilty.  She was 93 when she died a number of years ago, after having her leg amputated as a complication of diabetes at the ripe age of 91.  May God have mercy on her soul, if she had one.  She was an indigent.  She had never heard of Kobe, Black Angus, along with other such nonsense.  She was so poor like all the peasants around her; she used pieces of newspaper, if not her hand, to finish the job after Nature called.  She was a hard working woman who lived until she died, and her life was more than long enough. 

One of the problems, or perks, of having worked in the same place for a lifetime, is that I know where most of the potholes are, and where some of the bodies have been buried.  The setup has never been perfect, but somehow we have rocked along, year after year, surviving a number of administrations, without any drastic deconstruction.  Not too hot, not too cold, sort of lukewarm, and if I were Goldie, I would have loved it.  The "Steppenwolfe" would have considered ours to be the ideal place to have an accident while shaving! 

Between the personnel changes, within and without our department, the revolving doors through which people have been scooped off the streets, the contagion of the lack of training, lack of motivation, and generally lack of brains, problems are continuously being created while solutions are continuously being implemented to solve them.  Almost every day there are challenges.  Almost every day there is a new wrinkle.  Often the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.  Communication is skimpy, frequently at a need to know basis only.  As a result, many members of the staff, myself included, are clueless as to the latest developments, what newfangled polices have been instituted, what new items have been acquired or relocated, what old items have been deleted or substituted.  One would almost be inclined to think that ability of playing Sherlock Holmes might be an inherent qualification of employment.  It makes perfect sense to middle management to keep the majority of the gofers in the dark.  That way it gives rise to their sense of power by being in the know, exercise their authority of selective distribution of critical and/or current information, and conveniently allows for the shifting of blame whenever necessary.  The madness to the method has been illuminating.

Every week, or so it seems, I ask myself the same questions.  What can I do?  What should I do, with the remaining time that I have left of my life, the years ahead, presuming that I should live to the average lifespan of a transplanted Oriental male?  The answers have yet to be forthcoming.

Now that I have totally overdosed on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, day after day, night after night, every hour on the hour, I can hardly move myself to turn on the television, CNN in particular, to which I was glued for the first week after that historical disaster struck.  In short, I was depressed to the point of catatonia; vicariously like of course, and trying hard to imagine what the hurricane victims had to endure to survive.  Frankly, sitting in the comfort of my humble hut, away from the hustle and bustle, not walking in the moccasins soaked in the sludge that is the contaminated water, with decaying human and animal bodies, feces, excrement, oil and chemical spills, and fast brewing bacterial flora, how could I possibly have any fucking idea?? 

If there is one good thing I can salvage from this Act of GOD, whose mighty arms swept away in hours what took decades and generations of blood, sweat, and tears to build, it is the resiliency of the human spirit.  Already the air is seething with talks of rebuilding of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, especially New Orleans, regardless of the costs.  After all, we, as taxpayers should be overjoyed to shoulder the burdens and ecstasies of reconstruction, seeing that most of us have been selectively blessed to escape unscathed.  As the cliché goes, it’s a billion here, and a billion there, and pretty soon, we will be talking about some real moola.   

Congress will soon pass a bill for an initial down payment of say, 50 Billion dollars, for the clean up and the rebuilding efforts for New Orleans and part of the Mississippi Coast, with more federal funds to follow as needed.  Besides, can we not always print more greenbacks, in God We Trust, which will eventually double our standards of living, only for us to find things we need or want costing twice as much, while our purchasing power will be less than half of what we used to boast?  The logia, should you stop to think about it, is inescapable.  Thank GOD that HE did not wipe out Washington, D.C., what!

It may be difficult to believe that after the information overload in the last few days, and the long distance emotional shock and trauma of watching television, the first thing I did upon awakening was to turn on CNN, for the continuous wall to wall coverage on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The first thing I noticed, jarringly, that the O'Briens, both the anchor and the roving reporter, were extremely aggressive in the posing of their questions to the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Governor of Mississippi.  Instead of giving people who are doing the job of coping and everything they can for this natural disaster, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, in the nations's history, the benefit of the doubt, they were both adversarial, impatient, interrupting, wanting to hear themselves talk, before sufficient time was given to the respondent to fully answer their questions and/or elaborate on those anwers.  It was one thing, their job, to ask the hard questions, but quite another to be second quessing, Monday afternoon quarterbacking, and in a couple of cases, nit picking, when the magnitude and the logistics involved in dealing with the aftermath, in an ongoing crisis, where, however much planning might have been done, no one could actually prepare for the "real" thing, which surpassed all expectations.

Now, I must return to my regular Hurricane Katrina Aftermath viewing.