The first Saturday in March was the day of the long-awaited move of patients to the brand-new hospital at my paying job, a long-planned and staggeringly complex operation. I rode my bike to work for the first time in quite a while, despite the pouring rain. The new hospital has a lovely, secure bike room with lots of racks in it, plus a large number of racks outside the room for visitors.
The hospital provided free pastries and coffee for staff in the morning, and box lunches, but what I was really looking forward to was the pizza that was to be delivered at 5 p.m. While I was waiting for that, I went to every floor to look around. I noticed that, looking west, the view is of four churches. I went to the ICU and saw some of my newly arrived patients, including one who had just suffered such a horrendous family tragedy that she didn’t even know about it, because her husband had decided it was best not to tell her. (I believe she died without ever learning what had happened.) I offered the husband condolences. His first words were, “God is with me.”
The patient move seemed to go smoothly except for one patient who refused to leave his room at the old hospital. Last I heard that day, they had succeeded in getting him down to the emergency department, so I’m sure success was achieved in the end. I had seen chart notes warning that this or that patient was likely to die during transport, but none did.
There was only one glaring problem that day, to my knowledge. At 5 p.m., I rushed to the cafeteria along with lots of other staff members, only to see the same old pile of box lunches: no pizza. Someone said they had seen a huge amount of pizza being delivered, and we could all smell it, but they had stationed some guy in the cafeteria to explain to us that the pizza was only for “certain areas.” I was really kind of irate. It seemed wrong that they would tell us that staff would be getting pizza and then not provide it. It occurred to me that maybe the ICU was one of those certain areas, but I went back up there and it wasn’t. My mother sympathized. “It’s different than if they had said that at 5 p.m. there would be a salad bar.”
It was irritating to picture management on TV saying how great the move went—which it did, and they did go on TV to say so—while screwing people who worked hard to help make it happen. It was also kind of mystifying. How could this outfit successfully move more than a hundred patients, some of them at death’s door, across town without the slightest mishap and yet be incapable of causing pizza cooked by some outside entity to appear in the cafeteria?
Fuming, I set off for the parking garage. Before I could open a door on the ground floor where I needed to use my badge, someone on the other side opened it: the CEO of the hospital, Dr. Wrigley Bodacious (not his real name). I started toward the bike room, passing employees who were asking, “Where’s the pizza? Where’s the pizza?” Then I thought, “Wait a minute!” and I turned around to go have a word with Wrigley, who I’d never seen in person before. I walked back up to the lobby, where a security guard said that he had just stepped into an elevator, successfully eluding me.
At home, I gave Tom a call. He normally takes absolutely everything in stride, but even he was shaken: “That’s not right. People don’t forget a thing like that.” I came upon yet another flyer announcing the pizza delivery, which also had on it the number of the Command Center, so I called them. The guy there said he heard something had gone wrong with the delivery, but that they had pizza in such-and-such room if I wanted to come and get some.
The next day, I saw six or seven self-congratulatory emails from the move team, and replied to one of them expressing my disappointment about the pizza, and that’s the end of the story of the no pizza, as they did not reply. I hoped they would make this right in due time, but reckoned I would not be surprised if they didn’t, and to date, they have not.
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