You Want Your Cancer Meds WHEN?!?!

As a freelance "IT Guy" working part-time for a 3rd party dispatch service, I frequently pose as an employee of companies I've never heard of, at places I've never been for people I will never meet. That's all pretty awkward, but the hardest part to get used to is showing up at a place only to be faced with technology I've never laid hands-- or sometimes eyes-- on. In my life.

Yesterday I drove 40 miles out of town to a Rite-Aid to "replace a part in a printer," according to my work order. I showed up and identified myself to the nearest cashier as an employee of Silver Fox Solutions. I was asked to wait, then greeted by a pleasant, big-haired manager named Darlene who told me to follow her to the broken printer.

I was expecting to be taken to some crusty manager's office when Darlene dipped through the waist-high swinging door of the photo department and nodded at a large metal structure. She hooked her thumbs through the belt loops of her high-waisted jeans and said "There she be. Have fun." and dipped back into the store leaving the door swinging and me staring at the structure, blankly nodding my head.

It turned out that the monolith I was to service was the main digital imaging workstation for the photo department-- the thing that prints the customers' digital photos. I read through the PDF I was given when I accepted the job and the document took me through disassembly of the steel shell that housed the printer and the replacement of the faulty part.

After three hours, victory was mine when, suddenly, an entire roll of someone's pictures began to spit out one after the other-- a dozen or so flash-washed images of a house cat in various stages of repose on what must have been a new scratching post, Christmas tree in the background.

I'm trying not to get too stressed by the randomness of these jobs. I'm not about to lose sleep if I'm responsible for some fat-ass not getting his boring Christmas pictures back before New Year's day, but today I had to go fix some weird drug-dispensing tower at a hospital cancer ward.

Of course when I took the job I was merely told that I'd be troubleshooting a USB peripheral on a computer. In fact, the computer in question controlled a variety of "peripherals" including locks on two drug refrigerators and the doors and drawers of the giant drug-dispensing tower.

I introduced myself to the receptionist at the cancer ward as an employee of Generation Next, and when a nurse showed me to the drug tower, she assumed I was intimately familiar with not only the workings of "the system," but also its quirks. "Of course the fridge door takes forever to pop open once the system unlocks it, but you know how long we've been complaining about that."

The tower was loaded with drug vials with names like Cyclophosphamide and Mitomycin. The drugs are very expensive, she told me, up to $9,000 for a single dose. I was there because the drawers and doors of the tower no longer opened when "the system" told them to. I sized the whole shebang up and down with the nurse still standing there. I nodded slowly, gravely, with narrowed eyes, opening and closing the doors of the cabinet softly as if feeling for some tell-tale resistance in the hinges. "Mm-Hm..."

Once the nurse left me alone for a few minutes and I got a feel for how all of this equipment worked in concert, my panic subsided and I took notice of my immediate surroundings. There, taped to one of the drug refrigerators, was one of those "humorous" line drawings you'd see in a DMV cubicle or stuck to a cash register at a hole-in-the-wall auto parts store, or perhaps at a Rite-Aid photo department: a 10th generation photocopy of a guy falling on the ground and bursting into laughter saying "You want it When?!"

Wait, what?

"Excuse me, nurse? Can I please have my chemo?"
"When would you like that, sir?"
"Um, well, can I get it now? I mean I'm here and everything. And I'm dying and stuff"
"Wait... YOU WANT IT WHEN?! AHH-HA-HA-HA-HA"

Anyway, somehow I fixed the tower and got out of there. This job is so weird. I keep thinking one day the jig will be up.