Anyone who works for a company of a certain size inevitably has to face the happy-fun of the employee parking garage on a daily basis. A friend of mine once pointed out to me that the Best Buy corporate HQ in Minneapolis has the largest parking structure in North America. It was the size of the Vatican.

BGH has four towering monstrosities and two sprawling lots that fill and empty according to shifts. Have you ever taken a minute to stop and look at your parking-garage neighbors? I read license plates and wonder about the people who choose them. A few examples:

PEDSRN – pediatric RN. Not especially clever.

BEACHD – on a big blue pickup truck the size of an adolescent whale.

X2B8R – Funny. This has to be respiratory therapy or anesthesia.

ICU2 – Intensive Care Unit or ophthalmology?

DR WHO – This is either a lost intern or someone like me, who has dated a few doctors and blocked them all out of memory.

PLAYA DR – on a Lexus SUV with all the options. I hope he has a different car for taking the ladies around town. I’ve never seen the driver, but I have my personal suspicions about who owns this one.

MOECIA – on a gold Sebring convertible with gold chain plate frames, those funny hubcaps that spin backwards, tinted windows and a thundering stereo system. Draw your own conclusions about a likely driver. Now imagine my surprise when it parked next to me one day and a white guy with a gray mullet and a perm got out. Yeah.

Today is the annual BGH hospital-wide employee picnic. They handed out logo-emblazoned license plate frames to all the employees, encouraging us to decorate our vehicles with BGH pride. No one slapped on the bumper stickers a few years back, so I have low expectations for actually seeing these things around the parking lot… but I suppose that if Moecia can be a white guy with a mullet, anything is possible.

I hear he got some serious air time off that curb. From where he stood, Chris tells me that he thinks Arash flew about fifteen feet before hitting the ground. During that brief flight, Arash swears that the only thing going through his head was “not my hands!” over and over, a screaming mantra. He broke the fall with his face instead.

I was about five years old when I first heard of a pantyhose model insuring her legs for a million dollars. The magazine article said it was because if her legs were visibly damaged (even if not physically debilitated), she could no longer model and this would end her career, leave her unemployed, homeless, food stamps, the whole bit. She would get one million bucks if something scarred her leg and made it less photogenic. I wondered why, if her legs were injured, she couldn’t go get a job that required the use of her brain instead.

It makes a bit more sense to me now, with the wisdom of years. Lots of models insure their faces and bodies because they don’t have brains to fall back on. Those of us who do use our brains for our jobs qualify for disability payments if we sustain a brain injury that makes us unable to perform our jobs. Since the government does not view a leg scar as a disability, Miss Pantyhose has to fork over a premium to guarantee her livelihood in the event of a feral pig attack or a chance run-in with an angry dwarf.

Arash landed on his face and caught a serious road rash that made him look like an underdone side of bacon, but the real pain was that despite his best efforts, he sustained a distal radius fracture in his left wrist (he’s left-handed) that may or may not require pins and a plate to repair. He’s got a giant cast on, everything hurts, and his case is being reviewed by the orthopedic surgeons. They guess that he will either fully recover in eight to twelve weeks or not at all.

Did I mention that he’s a microvascular surgeon and he wasn’t wearing wrist guards while rollerblading down a paved slope at about thirty miles per hour? It makes about as much sense as the people who drive motorcycles on the freeways, complying with helmet laws but guarding their spines and vital thoracic organs with a t-shirt and shorts.

I guess it’s not just models who don’t have the brains to fall back on.
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Today I Feel: sleepy
Now Playing: “Sweetest Goodbye”
Maroon 5, Songs About Jane

It’s no wonder no one wants to read anymore. It’s gotten too expensive.

I balk when I go into the local Borders or B&N and pick up paperbacks priced at $16.95. That used to be the price of a new-release hardback with glossy cover and photo inserts and now it barely buys you the latest bubblegum-pink chick lit bound in cardstock. Over the last few years, I tacitly adopted an unofficial policy to only buy books new if I could get the “3 for 2” deal or something similar. eBay has become an even dearer friend.

But the scandalous costliness of so-called “discount” booksellers pales in comparison to what I found today: The Great American Journal Rip-Off. Search engines like PubMed and Google Scholar entice innocent researchers (like me) with scads of “relevant matches” to their queries, and then drop the bomb when we actually want to READ what has been written. Does anyone think we might actually rest easier just knowing that research is out there? It’s a dirty rotten trick, I tell you.

I’m currently putting together some research to write an article about the impact of the parenting practices of the 1980s on the career motivations of Generation Y – particularly in regard to their choices to both enter the nursing profession and break through the proverbial “glass ceiling” that limited the career development of Gen X and the Baby Boomer nurses. You’re on the edge of your seat, I know.

Anyway, in the course of my research I found the abstract of an article in the Journal of Nursing Administration that addressed the generational divide in nursing – the first one I had come across one the topic. Yet in order to actually read the article, I either have to purchase an 11-month subscription for more than a hundred bucks or pay $19.99 for a 24-hour “viewing period” in which I can look at the article but apparently not save a copy. I wonder if I can print or if the copyright gremlins have somehow disabled that function as well. But that’s beside the point. The article is four pages long. FOUR PAGES for twenty bucks. If you break down the subscription cost, I could buy two whole issues for that price, and they want it for four freaking pages. It makes Borders seem like a bargain.

And irony of it is that none of the article authors would see a dime of my twenty bucks. When I plunk down an obscene sum for the newest Nick Hornby novel, it warms my heart a teeny bit to know that at least a few quid will find their way from the cash register into Nick Hornby’s pocket. After all, he did the work, so it makes sense he should reap the reward. But people who write for peer-reviewed journals apparently get the shaft. It does NOT cost ten bucks to print each issue of JONA, yet that’s what they charge subscribers. I know it probably doesn’t cost $3.95 to print Us Weekly either, but it is one thing to rip off the tabloid-hungry groundlings. It is quite another to charge exorbitant fees for access to research.

In this case, I was in luck. I sent out an email to several of my bosses and clinical nurse specialists, asking if anyone had a subscription. Candace emailed me back and said she didn’t, but to check with Coreen. Coreen is out of town so I asked her assistant Diane who just had lunch with the Retention Chairwoman who does in fact have a subscription and will send me the file electronically. Crisis averted. But it’s silly, isn’t it? This article and so many like it are online – there’s no overhead, no printing and assembly costs to recoup, yet people are probably shelling out twenty smackers (and more!) for four pages that they have to print on their own machines. What’s the point of doing research if no one can afford to appreciate it?

Shabbat Shalom. I’m going to go spend the twenty bucks I saved on some new shoes. It’s blister research.

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Today I Feel: antsy
Now Playing: “Why, Georgia?”
John Mayer, Room For Squares