Captions Sunday!

I’ve been accused of many things, none of them are true; but my career in medicine is gone. Well, not totally gone...I guess I’m technically still in the medical field... 

I researched ways to combat and reduce the severity of the COVID virus. I NEVER claimed—ever—to have a CURE. What I researched, tested, and discovered was a suite of nutrients, and substances naturally occuring in the body that not only made you healthier, but reduced the SYMPTOMS of COVID until you never even feel sick at all. Yes, you’ll still NEED a vaccine, you still need to quarantine, but not only would the virus NOT KILL YOU, but you would barely feel ill! 

I had six months worth of double-blind testing! The results I got were NOT FAKE! But I think, on instruction from pharmaceutical corporation higher-ups (I will never be able to prove this), I was thrown into enforced quarantine-isolation for one month, I was officially declared “Deceased from COVID-19” and I have only been allowed back into the world of regular community and commerce if I accepted the latest form of “COVID Passport” which overrides the life and identity I’ve had for sixty years—even down to replacing my Social Security Number! No longer able to research scientific AND innovative ways to make people healthy, no longer the peer of my former hospital and university colleagues, no longer equal to the most skilled surgeons, I have been reduced to being a scrub in a hospital!

 

Whoever did this to me, still has their eyes on me, because I would have been “busted” down to the level of hospital custodian if I weren’t considered too ‘old’ for the work! But I have to scrub surfaces and prep for surgery the operating rooms. I have to kowtow to surgeons, nurses, and even orderlies who are twenty, thirty, almost forty years my junior! 

Only last month a “new” version of COVID vaccine touched down which “drastically reduces symptoms, and INCREASES the well-being of the patient”!! If this is using my research, no doubt the new vaccine—whose additional ingredients cost pennies per patient—has earned the pharmaceutical company hundreds of millions of dollars in the first week of its debut alone! I did not devote my professional life to becoming a medical researcher to get rich—Jonas Salk didn’t choose to get rich from his polio vaccine either—but I am a sixty-year-old scrub woman, surrounded by “real” medical professionals, and it’s been ‘communicated’ to me that if I try to blow my ‘cover’ I will REALLY find out what professional and social dropdown feels like...

Executive Colleagues Staying...at “my” Hotel!! 

“Privilege” is a dirty word nowadays, but if hard work gained me more of it, I wasn’t going to complain. 

I’ve knocked my head against the ‘Glass Ceiling’ enough times, and I didn’t get cut too much—when I smashed through it! One of the dearest perks of being a successful woman manager is making the acqaintance—and friendship—of other successful women. Informally we call our group “The Ceiling Busters!” I think, without danger of swelled heads, we more than hold our own in our respective male-dominated workplaces!

 I have another reason why a swelled head is NOT a danger for me: I spend my vacations as——a hotel housekeeper! 

No one can be the best at everything (boy is THAT an understatement!), but I learned, instead of overcompensating for what you don’t do well, find a way to enjoy being plain and small. Not everyone needs to go there, but I sure do! So I hire on at a hotel for one month out of the year, which is the bare minimum most places will tolerate and still hire you. I let my executive friends know I’d be missing our monthly meet-up. 

“That’ll be a shame: we’re thinking of doing more for this month’s meeting. Are you sure you want to miss out?” 

I had no idea they were going to have a week-long get together instead of just a one day meeting. I had no idea they were going to visit a hotel in a different city from the one we usually meet. 

A housekeeper has no time to look at hotel bookings—we have rooms to clean! I was emptying the trash from the wastebaskets in the lobby when the ladies in my group WALKED IN THE DOOR! I turned my back to them, finished with the trash, and scurried OUT of there!! Sure enough, “The Ceiling Busters” were booked at the hotel for a week!! 

How can I avoid them SEEING me??? I CAN’T! If I have to clean one of their rooms, I have to hope they won’t be there when I knock on the door at Noon! If they eat at the restaurant, I may be on duty then, and I’ll have to TAKE THEIR ORDERS!! I just don’t know what to do!!!

How They Defined “Essential Work” 

I tried to reform the workplace. I thought the way to make work better and healthier for everyone was to embrace human values—not tech, tech, and more tech. I was voted down; the other (male, naturally) executives, not only get “wet” over technical solutions, they wanted to run the company using Artificial Intelligence! 

“How,” I tried to argue, “can machines ever come up with HUMANE solutions to our problems?! Sifting through piles of data to find patterns—ANY patterns—isn’t really intelligence! No matter, I was overruled. As a sop to me, the smarmiest of the tech-headed execs came to me and requested a copy of a manifesto I published online, having to do with the dignity of work, especially what the COVID crisis called “essential” work. I had no faith that any input of mine was going to be used in A.I., but I gave him a thumbdrive with the manifesto in a text file. 

Within a week the assembled executives (me barely included) called a meeting. They had ALREADY set up our company to be run by Artificial Intelligence, and the first results were expected within minutes! The fools!! They were so sure of the system they set up, the bylaws of the corporation were already rewritten to make the A.I. decisions BINDING for ALL employees!! Imagine their dismay when HAL (the execu-geek that oversaw the project loved Arthur C. Clarke) LAID THEM ALL OFF, claiming that their positions were Non-Essential!! The only person on the executive board NOT laid off was...me. 

I wish I had been. 

The A.I. figured out—somehow—that I was the most productive member of the executive board; as such, I was the most “essential”. But while A.I. used my words as part of its methods, they got the DEFINITION of the word, “essential”, from the Internet!! The A.I., now making the decisions the executive board used to, assigned me to what the COVID days defined as “essential” work: I am now a HOUSEKEEPER keeping the lower floor offices and the old board rooms cleaned and dusted! Unlike my former fellow executives, I get to retire on a healthy pension, but I don’t GET to retire for another twenty years!!! Until then, I clean the head office building for $7.25 an hour!! 

Unfortunately, the Artificial Intelligence now running the company understands the Law better—and more ruthlessly—than any human lawyer! Using deeply nested and arcane laws, if I quit this job I can be charged WITH A FELONY!! Apparently my former fellow executives were so “non-essential” that A.I. decided they didn’t have access or memory of crucial company secrets—but I DID!! So my place in life is cleaning and dusting offices that hardly ever see use—for the next twenty years!

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