My Red Stapler has moved to WordPress!

red swingline stapler:
a fear of change, like Milton
but i don’t think so

Prettier now, no? Someone had already taken the “myredstapler” prefix, so welcome to the newly sovereign Red Stapler Nation!

Let’s call this an experiment in boredom, shall we?

My best friend has up and joined the Police Academy. I was really just kidding when I bought her that “Pistol-Packin’ Mama” t-shirt at the Houston Rodeo last year. I’m so very happy for her (really) because while various life events have kept her from applying until recently, I know this has been a dream of hers for a long time.

The big bummer is the fact that homegirl will no longer be working with me at The Hospital. No more project buddy, no more lunch buddy, no more person to bug on Instant Messenger when she’s busy and I’m not. This is what I get for having only one friend.

Ah, such nostalgia – the unit secretary and resource assistant days we shared, the mutual upward move to Perioperative Services and subsequent cluelessness about our new environment. We sat through Lean Sigma Yellow Belt training and pulled off a major presentation in 2 1/2 days. We pick each other’s brains for ideas, work on project teams, and have developed a reputation as the Wonder Twin Powers. (Well, we call ourselves that. Everyone else just thinks we’re good to put on a project together, but we like to pretend we’re superheroes because we always pull it off with aplomb.)

These days are coming to an end. Of course, I still live just down the street from her, and I suspect that the corner of her couch where I always crash will develop a much more prominent dent in the shape of my butt over the months to come. Sure, we’ll still have pizza and beer nights when we do nothing but amuse ourselves with her baby’s ever-changing antics while her husband is plugged into World of Warcraft. She’ll still be my sounding board and I’ll still be hers, but it’s a sad, sad day when The Hospital loses a stellar employee and I lose my best homegirl at work.

I thought about titling this post “Apocalypse Now,” but I thought that might be a teesy bit overdramatic. After all, I contributed to this. I filled out the character reference for the Metropolitan Police Department and said all sorts of glowing and warm fuzzy things about her work ethic, determination, committment, mighty omnipotence, etc. I conveniently chose to leave out those instances of public drunkenness and expulsion from hoosier dive bars, because I know how important this is to her. (Plus, I only heard about that bounced-from-the-bar night secondhand, so I couldn’t honestly say that I KNOW that happened. Public drunkenness and a deep appreciation for PBR and Stag, this I can attest to.)

And so, in memory of a great working relationship and in honor of a continuing friendship, I have written a haiku. Mel – this is for you.

Trade blue scrubs for blue
polyester, new holster
on her Yellow Belt.

I’d like to trade my
cube for a ball so that I
could roll back and forth.

Courtesy of WorkHaiku.

I used to write haiku. I was a wild and crazy haiku fiend. Sometimes, for the amusement of my coworkers, I’d scribble out a 5-7-5 about one of the patients. It inevitably lightened the mood of the workday – which I’m sure is sacrilige to the ancient art of Japanese minimalistic wordsmithing, but you know all the best inventions happen on accident. You know the kind – you’re trying to create a super-permanent glue that never comes off and you end up as the gazillionaire who created the sticky goo on the backs of Post-Its. Serendipitous. Work haiku had to be like that. We’re all trying to make something beautiful, something purposeful to help us sort out a meaning from the chaos. And even though all we come up with is something a little funny, it ticks the time away and we’re seventeen syllables closer to happy hour.

Here’s the Red Stapler’s personal best, written in honor of a patient who had a nurse call light in one hand and a pain medication pump control in the other, and was constantly clicking them both and making angry facial expressions at us since, due to her recent laryngectomy, she could express her frustration no other way.

Playing castanets
with her call light, a Spanish
dancer without sound.