I like to hide behind my glasses when I feel uptightFor about two months now I've been working as a tech writer for a biomedical technology company here in Jacksonville. While I've done my share of documentation gigs over the years, I've never really been at a place like this before.
I like to hide behind my glasses when I’m trippin' in the strobelight
Hide behind my glasses so I can give you all dirty looksIncompetent, moron, son of a jerk!
The campus is split into two equal halves, with one side housing engineers, salespeople, management types, and various corporate drones like me -- while the other is a full-time manufacturing facility charged with assembling, testing, and sterilizing a dizzying array of medical implements and surgical tools that are shipped all over the world and subsequently jammed into the ears, noses, and throats of the infirmed.
From my chair next to the color printer, I experience an odd combination of generally simple work oriented around impossibly difficult subject matter. In other words, I can easily describe the tasks that I do on a daily basis, but I can't really pronounce the names of anything I'm responsible for. It's an oddly postmodern exercise wherein the words I type are more like objects to be arranged than any sort of tools for communication with another human being.
As a result, I find myself continually having to venture from the relative familiarity and safety of the cubicle farm over into the alien world on the other side to get assistance from people who actually know what this stuff is and what it does. That being said, it's not really as simple as walking east to west, because the vast majority of the items made here are intended for use in operating rooms and outpatient centers - which requires production inside the confines of a sterilized environment.
To get from my desk to the production center requires a stop inside the company airlock, where everyone who enters has to go through a short cleaning process followed by the issuing of lab coats, hairnets, and facemasks. No matter who you are or what you're there for, no matter how long you intend to be there - you have to put on the stuff.
It makes total sense of course, it's not like you want to be laying on a table somewhere with a surgeon who's off his game because the laryngeal blade he was planning to use had a hair in it -- but here, half a world away from the possibility of anything like that ever happening what it actually means is that whenever I need to talk to the quality assurance people I have to cross over into this alternate universe where everyone is dressed exactly the same and you can't see their mouths moving while they talk.
The lab coats are blue and the hairnets are white -- Every time IIt's hard not to feel a little silly in a hairnet, but the odd thing is that once you step across the threshold into this place where everyone else has one, you tend to forget it's there. Or maybe it's more the fact that when everyone you see looks equally ridiculous, it's easier to dismiss your own discomfort.
go over there I can't help but hum the theme song from the Smurfs.
Everyone that works on that side seems really nice, and regardless of how busy it seems they never hesitate to stop for a second and answer my silly questions or sign the approval sheets that I hand to them. It's an odd contrast to the facade-heavy corporate world I sit in, although I'm probably not really over there enough to see what it's really like.
All I ever see are the various brands of tennis shoes that poke out from under the lab coats and the tiny faces framed inside the netting that keep the products from getting contaminated. Tiny hints of individuality floating on a sea of necessary sameness, like snapshots of the people underneath.
It makes you wonder about the coverings we put on ourselves when we step outside our own sanctuaries. The cars we drive, the clothes we choose. Perfumes and colognes, hairstyles and welcoming smiles -- all hairnets and facemasks of a different sort -- putting a barrier between us and the people we don't know enough to bring inside our real lives, places filled with the kinds of insecurities and vulnerabilities we don't want contaminated.
Last Thursday I was sitting at my desk, listening to headphones and staring alone into the words on my computer screen when a tap came on my shoulder. I turned in my chair to find the figure of a stunning blonde woman I had never seen before looking into my eyes. I returned the grin as I removed the buds from my ears, honestly disarmed by the surprise of her calm beauty being as close as it was. She apologized for bugging me, and asked if I knew where the new tech writer's desk was.Almost like we create our own clean rooms to protect who we really are.
Sensing a slightly open door, I widened my smile a bit and answeredHer eyes seemed to change a bit, almost like she was chewing something over in her mind that didn't quite taste the way she thought it would. Even though I was facing her, it was hard not to feel the weight of the stare that kept returning to the bald patch on the top of my head and the extra weight that surrounds my midsection."Oh, that's me -- I'm the new tech writer."
You could almost hear the disappointment in her voice as she handed me the stack of paper clipped forms she had reviewed and signed. Somewhere in that all-too heavy moment it was hard not to think that it would have been equally as simple for her to send the paperwork through inter-office mail like everyone else does. Unless of course she had a reason to venture past the borders of Smurf village, even if it was nothing more than wanting to see what someone looked like without the hairnets and lab coats getting in the way.
She apologized again, then disappeared down the hall.So don't ask me why I put on my glasses again
Don't ask me why I put on my glasses again
I must repeat myself because I have to win
Don't ask me why I put on my glasses again..
[Listening to: Fishbone,"Sunless Saturday"]
Comments