I was just standing outside my building in the muggy Chicago morning. I was holding my huge coffee mug, happily sipping while I smoked a cigarette. Suddenly, a woman came jogging by on her morning run. Here I was, sedentary, poisoning my body with the usual means, and she was doing the health thing. "We are diametrically opposed," I thought. And then she shot me a perky "Good morning!" I like to imagine that at that moment she both despised me and was jealous of me. She was probably just startled.

So, I had my work orientation yesterday, and if being bored out of my mind was their goal, I am now oriented. Basically, it was seven hours of tips on being polite.

Highlight #1: A video presentation called 'Heroes.' One of the women leading the orientation introduced it as a video that exemplified what Advocate Health Care was all about. Basically, it was one slow dissolve after another of old people, little kids, and smiling doctors, all to the tune of some shmaltzy song. Imagine it was the song 'We Can Be Heroes,' although it wasn't. It doesn't matter. All I could think about was how some yutz in the A/V department probably took himself a week to edit it at the comfy average of $150 an hour.

Highlight #2: We were taught how to deal with a patient's "Fragile Moments." I was immediately repulsed at the very mention of this phrase, but then they gave us scripts to act out with the people sitting next to us. I'll spare you verbatim retellings, but let me say that the scripts are the most polite responses one can produce to any situation, be it a patient getting angry for having to wait, to homesickness, to losing their umbrella, to calling a chaplain for their 'spiritual needs' to whatever. Strangely, there was no script for that old classic 'Patient Sticks Fork In Your Eye.' This is how it would have read, though, had they included it.

SITUATION: Patient Sticks Fork in Your Eye.

RESPONSE: "I am very sorry that you have decided to stick a fork in my eye at this time, (name). Is there anything I can do to make your stay more comfortable? My other eye is available for additional fork stabbings, or I could get you some juice."

Why, oh bloody why, have I chosen to work in a hospital? I hate hospitals. Always so many sick people, that's the problem.

Unemployment is so very, very underappreciated.