was the nicest and most thoughtful thing I’ve been told in the last four hours. That qualifies for sweet talking and we got rules about that. Ignore those rules or I’ll file a complaint. Now move, nice man.”
Karl started for the door, then side stepped a preoccupied lady with one of the shortest skirts he’d ever seen. He wondered, “Where DO they get clothes like that?” His wife Sophie would take him clothes shopping, then brag to her friends that he was the only man in Creation that didn’t mind procurement sojourns. Sears and Macy’s never had a kiosk or section featuring butt length leather straps loosely titled ‘skirts’. Must come from a different genre store. Hot Topic?
There was the interview-room door, but he took the nice lady Officer’s advice and swung by the Men’s facility first. That done, he returned and gave a double knock.
“Come in.” It was a woman’s voice, as expected from the Desk Officer. First blush, it sounded nice enough, but tired. He often worked with a lot of overworked members of the fairer sex. Was there ever in the history of mankind a health related facility that didn’t have understaffing issues? A lot of the workers he met there sounded tired a lot of the time. Karl Hoffman opened the door.
“Um, Detective Roland?”
The room was an eight by eight. The desk was oblong, and there was a chair on each of the long sides. Two other chairs were in the corner, probably in case of larger interviewees and -ers. The Detective looked to be in her mid to late 40’s, with just a hint of graying at the temples. She wore a respectably modest pants suit, professional looking, and Karl thought the badge looked kind of cute on her...and immediately shook off that thought. This was not the time or place, if there ever would be.
“You must be Karl Hoffman? Ah, good. Please come in and have a seat.”
“Pardon me, Detective, but I have to say that between you and the desk Officer, well, you Police folk seem pretty polite compared to what I see on the tube.”
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Hoffman. Don’t buy the drama on the television shows. When people are nice to us, we can be nice to them. Everyone’s digestion wins. Now, do you know why you’ve been called here for interview?”
Karl suspected, and would need to be careful. “Well, Detective, I’m guessing it’s because of this electrical stuff people are worried about. Today’s paper listed some of the theories, but I’ve also heard where some people suspect North Korean sabotage.”
“Oh? I didn’t hear that one, yet. Why North Korea instead of China or Russia?”
“Ma’am, because it’s been a weapon that didn’t do a darned bit of harm due to poor engineering.”
Detective Roland got an honest chuckle out of that, despite the mildly dark circles under her eyes. They would be darker by shift’s end. IF it ended. There was a backlog to interview and, as this screwy thing got bigger, the specter of double shifts loomed larger.
“Good one, Mr. Hoffman. You’re here because you work at the first location where the anomalies were detected about six weeks ago. Others at your place of business have mentioned your name, nicely I might add, as having had direct experience with this anomaly. We have your written statement, but I put more stock in face to face time, and it’s hard to have the kind of interaction I prefer unless it’s person to person.”
“Yes, Ma’am. Used to feel the same way about Sophie, my wife. She’s been gone for three years, now.”
Detective Alice Roland didn’t know whether to laugh or express condolence for a sad circumstance. Strange how this stranger so quickly put her into an awkward stance. She was usually much better than that. “I’m...sorry for your loss, Mr. Hoffman. I’ll try to get this over with so you can get home at a reasonable hour. According to your deposition, you’ve been in charge of general maintenance at the Granite City Chronic Care Facility for the last nine years, and started work there almost thirty years ago. Your coworkers in their statements generally hold you in high esteem and believe you are both a reliable witness and a genius at repairing just about anything. What I’d like from you is this. Your report was a black on white drawing. Accurate and focused, but not as detailed as I’d like on the broader picture. Pull out your sixty-four crayon box and give it all the colors. Take your time, begin when you are ready.”
Now that was novel, he mused. A nice looking younger woman, a stranger at that, actually wanted to listen to what an older man had to say, for free. Well maybe there was hope for the next generation after all. He mentally corrected himself. The younger generation always had hope. It was HIS generation that hoped to continue to be listened to, to be appreciated, and to serve and be of value. Well, here was opportunity knocking to be useful. Karl Hoffman answered.
“Six weeks? Yes, seems right, but time can seem funny, sometimes. The Facility is an older building, but not ancient. It’s just new enough where a jack-of-all-trades like me can pretty well keep on top of the day to day repair needs. In ten or twenty years, that will probably change as plumbing and electrical wear and tear will put the institution on some political hot-potato docket, complete with referendums and utilization review teams arguing city finances versus jobs. By that time, I’ll either be either training someone to take my place, or already be retired.”
The Facility, as it was nick-named, was a three-hundred bed complex that some called a chronic-care assisted-living facility. Literalists just said it was a home for permanently broken people. Not that this was a bad thing. Most of the people working there at the Facility were pretty dedicated and skilled. Of course, there were a significant minority who did the least possible and caused the most problems in the process. Half of all companies of five or more employees had one of those. Any company with more than twenty personnel? Such a person(s) was a guaranteed presence. By some quirk of nature, an unfair number of these people became supervisors. The Devil had a soft spot for Human Resources departments.
The Facility had a percentage of private-pay patients, a reasonable mix of State-mandated care situations, some VA referrals, and a surprising number of relatives of some pretty well-known celebrities. Yes, the care was good there given mostly by very good and skilled people. About twenty percent of the budget of running the place came from endowments of those for whom Granite City Chronic Care Facility was their final home and likely most caring perceived family circle.
By and large, the vast majority of residents were elderly, with a reasonable representation of head-trauma people derived from either foreign military opponents or head-ons with trees. Once in a while, you get a kid.
Karl Hoffman was chasing down a short under the nurse’s counter for Wing 2 East that knocked out the transcription device. No doubt that other maintenance and housekeeping people would rib him about checking the view up nursing skirts while he was there under the desk. Five years ago he might have joked about it. Thirty years ago, there might have been a grain of truth to their suggestions of roving eyes. A happy marriage changed all of that. Widowhood set that change in melancholy cement.
The loose wire was quickly found. One of the taller nursing staff or doctors must have been hitting their knee against a dangling wire-nut while typing in reports. That was easily enough fixed. While making magic with his soldering gun and wire stripper, he overheard the GP giving the charge nurse an overview of a new resident.
“Colin Craft, age six. Family killed on their yacht thanks to a rogue wave off the Florida coast. Boy was down in the cabin, so he was the only one not washed overboard. Child was thrown around the cabin and struck his head three times, impact to the right parietal, left temporal, and direct occipital regions of the skull. Fractures also to three ribs and the left fibula. EEG shows minimal mental activity in the neocortex, while the paleocortex reads almost normal. Fractures have healed, including the parietal bone of the skull.
“All blood work normal as of three days ago. Breathing is normal frequency for age, equal chest expansion, no rales or ronchi heard, heart sounds WNL (within n
ormal limits), PERL (pupils equal and reactive to light) but sluggish bilateral. This is a personal/private pay. Private duty part time PT (physical therapist) employed to maintain extremity soft tissue suppleness and muscle tone, joint flexibility, and other soft tissue work. Regular lymphatic and deep tissue massage therapy will be on a daily basis.”
Karl had heard of sad things like this before at the Facility. Add another ‘poor little rich kid’ to the roster. One of the sadder things about them was that they tended to live a lot longer than the typical new resident. There was one on the fifth floor in a vegetative state since Karl first started working there. It seemed so strange to see a child grow up to be a man in body only, leaving the mind behind long ago. That one, coincidentally, was a boating related injury too. Felix, the boy, fell out of a canoe on a scouting trip. His canoe hit a rock or something like that and tipped over. The kid was supposed to be a good swimmer and the water wasn’t more than a foot or two deep, plus he had on a life jacket. But you can’t plan on everything. Felix hit his head and knocked him out. By the time they caught up with him downstream, oxygen deprivation had truly lived up to its name. Felix had been deprived of