Profession

Day nine

I deep-conditioned my hair the next morning and used lots of lotion; the stuff from the mandated showers after work really dried out my skin and hair. I dressed in the scrubs, laying out the clothes I wanted to wear to dinner since I wouldn't have much time to get ready, and went to work. The pups were staying home again due to the foul weather. The breath analysis had turned into a daily thing, I noticed, and the locker room was more subdued than usual. The staff was prepared to deal with mental illness, not epidemiology, and word was that another patient had died overnight. This was acknowledged in the staff meeting, but the good news was that only three new cases had been taken to the infirmary over the past twenty-four hours, sparking hopes that maybe we'd seen the worst of the epidemic. The vector still hadn't been discovered, the CDC had found a more efficient medication protocol for many of the patients--not all could tolerate the drugs, however--and about half the cells had been cleaned. The mayor had been notified, and a press release was going out later today. Our new schedules were in our email, along with the hope that all this would be very temporary and that we'd go back to our normal routine quickly.

Our priority was to get the cells cleaned, so everybody broke up to work on that. Crews had been working around the clock on it. The patients were frightened to various degrees, and I sympathized. It must be scary to be locked up, unable to do anything to try to evade the disease, but there was nothing more that we could do; they were in Arkham for a reason and needed to be kept under control. But after lunch, I caught a break and got to finish up in the basement.

The last room had boxes of what looked like obsolete office equipment, things like antique desk lamps. We didn't even have power sources for those any more. But they were metal, which meant recycling, and I'd been provided with bins on wheels to dump these things in to make clearing the hallways more efficient since the work crews were down there now. Their work had gone faster than expected as well, and they were finishing up. Another crew was ripping up the yuckky old carpet in the offices in preparation for installing new. The last filing cabinets were also clear, so they went out in the hall. I dumped a box of crap I didn't even know what it'd all been used for, but it was that crappy old plastic that couldn't be recycled, and took the opportunity to stretch. Something in the bin caught my eye and I picked it out. It looked kind of familiar, but I didn't quite know what it was. I'd been warned when I started that some old devices had dangers in them, and I didn't want to inadvertently harm myself. I went back into the room and photographed it, running an image search through my work communicator to figure out what it was. It took longer than expected, but it was a data storage from the twenty-first century that had been called, variously, a thumb drive or a flash drive. Apparently there had been these huge ports on their computers that you stuck the thing into for transfer of data. Bizarre. I had nothing that was compatible, so I dropped it in my pocket and brought out the last two boxes, dumping them appropriately, then folding the boxes flat. I wasn't that thrilled to see Dr Strange there, poking around in the bins. He picked out a gizmo and frowned.

"What is that, do you know?" I asked.

"It's a stapler," he explained, then showed me the bars of little wire segments that fit inside. "You used to secure papers together with it." He found a scrap of paper in the recycle bin and demonstrated. The noise from the slap of the device made me jump.

"Wow. That's wild," I said. These days, paper wasn't routinely used or wood pulp and had a slight charge that could be increased with a special pressure bar that kept the papers together without damage and allowed for easy separation. I picked up the collapsed boxes and stepped around.

"Are you finished?" he asked.

"Yep. You took care of the last of the confidential material, I've sorted out the junk, and it won't be long until these offices are ready."