Lonely guy seeks old café and three buddies
The Column: 10.06.21
I am an orphan, which is not so unusual for a man of 79, and like everyone else I know, I work out of my own home and at the moment I’m sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of Cheerios beside the laptop and a cup of coffee (black). I have no office anymore. I’ve had offices, not cubicles but offices with doors and a window, sometimes a credenza, since I was 22 years old. I miss them.
If someone opens a Museum of the American Office, I volunteer to be a docent and I’ll show them around the office of fifty years ago with the mimeograph machine, the manual typewriter, and the big telephone with the long curly cord that went into the wall. There was no copier, we used carbon paper. Someone knocked on the door and I hid my copy of Portnoy’s Complaint in the top drawer and a woman poked her head in and said, “The meeting is about to begin.”
That’s what I miss, the meeting. They were like little morality plays, in which people assumed allegorical roles, Dreamers, Realists, Satirists and Strategists, and the outcome was usually to maintain inertia but they were entertaining. I was a satirist in my early years and then suddenly I became the boss and I was surrounded by realists, and at the end of my office career, I became a dreamer and the two women employees listened and took turns being the assassin who points out the deadly reality so not much happened but I was okay with that. The pleasure was in the meeting itself.
We cleared out the office because we didn’t need it, the copier went, the coffeemaker, conference table, the files were packed off to Deep Storage (where we’ll all wind up someday), and we went home.
Electronics made the office redundant, no need to be combed and suited up by 9 a.m. I imagine the Oval Office may be only a ceremonial room and Joe, though still the most powerful man in the world, may be working from his breakfast table in his T-shirt and pajamas like me. Maybe the Supreme Court will decide to go on conferring by Zoom, the justices at home in their judicial bathrobes.
But I miss it, those friendly Good Mornings as I, Mr. Boss Man, walk in. My wife says Good Morning but sometimes she also says, “You really need to do something about your hair. And your eyebrows. My gosh. How do you see through those things?” My employees never said that.
So now I sit at a laptop at my kitchen table, still in pajamas at noon, and I compose limericks like:
The poet Sylvia Plath
Suffered depression and wrath:
The day that she dove
Headfirst in the stove,
She should've just had a hot bath.A man doesn’t need a staff to sit around a conference table and help him write five-line limericks. But it’s lonely and there’s a loss of status. When you can no longer say, “I have a meeting at the office this morning” people put (Ret.) after your name, and I don’t want that. I’ve thought of about getting myself a psychotherapist just to have someone to meet with and talk about stuff but I’d be trying to amuse her, which is my line of work, and she’d be probing for the dark dank cellars of my unconscious though there truly are none, I’ve looked, and my unconscious has no basement, it’s a solid concrete slab, nothing mysterious about it. I have friends who are in the therapy business and they listen much too closely and the way they say “Hmmm” and “Oh really?” makes me uneasy.
So I’m trying to get together some men to have lunch with. I’ve got one guy, a former Republican, formerly in the investment biz, a guy who turns to the sports page first thing every morning. He’s perfect. Now I need to find two more sort of like him. I’m a Democrat so I’d like a Republican and maybe a guy who knows about science. Race and ethnicity don’t matter. Two guys over forty. Nobody in the arts. If we met this morning, I’d look through my enormous eyebrows and tell about two lively small towns in Pennsylvania I saw this weekend, Sellersville and Jim Thorpe, and how walking around in them made me love this country more than ever. Someday I’ll find my group. Oyster stew and a grilled cheese. Coffee. Looking forward.
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During my career as a clinical scientist at a local hospital, we had mandatory quarterly department meetings to inform staff and clear the air on current laboratory issues. As you mentioned in the column of 10/6/21, not much happened and that was generally all right.
The only really notable meeting that I attended happened around the fall of 2010. It was the time the hospital administration and board of directors had bought into Elizabeth Holmes’ fantasy of Theranos. The lab group meeting was with the corporation’s director of laboratories. She wasn’t a medical director, only a corporate director. Her attention is costs and revenue in the laboratory department.
The Theranos analyzing system seemed like a huge windfall to her. The multimillion costs of running a clinical laboratory for a hospital system were a huge expense. To replace the testing equipment and the professional staff to run and maintain this would be a huge saving to the hospital and to medical expenses in general.
The director's first statement at this meeting to the lab staff was “Think about a second career.” “In a very short time, your positions will be eliminated” There was no mincing of words or any support. We all stared at each other. I think someone said, “What?” What a callous way to declare that all your study and dedication to your science was all for not. Being replaced by a box the size of a bread-making machine. The director had gone through the same schooling and training that we all had to be competent and service the community as laboratory professionals. She had gone back to school to obtain a master's in science to qualify as a director. She had just discounted all our efforts in a couple of short sentences. It was quite a slap.
Ahh, but the worm turns in this tale. The hospital’s chief officers started to have plans to affiliate with local pharmacies and retailers to establish a web of local accessible “Health centers” run by trained medical assistants to procure patient specimens and perform lab tests for a whole lot less cost. The people in the hospital laboratory would just have to find jobs in real estate or lawn care and snow removal business. So we waited for our layoff slips to arrive.
Then came the crack in the dam in 2015 where stories and federal investigations into problems were reported by insiders about the authenticity and accuracy of this miracle of technology and cost-saving device. By June 2018, Elizabeth Holmes with her Chief Operating Officer had been indicted by a federal grand jury and her corporation and machine had been seized from their control.
It was the walk back of statements by the corporate directors that would have been most appreciated but that never happened. The woman who declared our professional demise was reassigned to a subordinate position and she only appeared at a few meetings not to really have much to say. She retired soon after. I wasn’t invited to her retirement party.
Garrison- to me- this is you at your best- and that is pretty damn good!