Stupidity…
Oscar Wilde, the witty man who just had to be witty, called it the only sin. From the countless movies, books, real life situations, you’d think it’s actually quite amusing.
At least, that’s what I thought until yesterday.
I had gone to the XYZ, Nationally Renowned Hospital for Eye Care. The stress is on ‘eye care.’ Yeah, sure loads of people (like me) may just go there for a regular eye check up, but the majority actually suffer from some problem…a visually impairing problem. So you’d think the Hospital Management would have had some empathy or failing that an ounce of common sense. But HELL NO ! The hospital, with it’s various departments, is so structured that it becomes the most ‘disabled-unfriendly’ place out there. Did I mention the ‘n’ number of stairs we had to go up & down, the weird catacomb system where you’d go from room No A (on the second floor) to Room No Z (in the pseudo basement) then work your way through the rest, in an odd jumbled zigzag manner. I, personally, didn’t mind it. Could use the exercise, the fat arse that I am. But there was this real old lady, with a hearing aid & soda cap glasses, who seemed to be suffering from a double dose of arthritis and making her go through this weirdly arranged hospital was just plain criminal.
They had a whole gaggle of seriously dressed ladies, with a bunch of files, walking around the place like fresh zombies, calling people out like in roll call, and then sending them into wrong departments. No wonder why I met three bereaved people, all, searching for their lost loved ones. There was a woman who was wandering about searching for her husband who’d been sent for a retina test, but ended up in the LASIK surgery unit. There was another, whose glasses had been taken away by one of those vile zombies (presumably to check it’s power or so they said,) and then he’d been told to move from Room C to Room J (countless stairways away), sans glasses, tripping and bumping along, unaided; Cruel, Cruel World.
And then, to cap it all, there was this contraption that took the cake and smashed it on my face.
The idea is that you sit behind door No 1 and the machine does an instant eye test. Then they walk you up to a seat behind door no 2 and tell you to wait, while the Doc sitting in cubicle no 3 swings a shiny new lever and you are taken mechanically to the opening of cubical 3. Once there, the doctor asks you a single question of whether you’d like LASIK surgery (the most profitable venture out there, probably) and then tells you to move on to room No Z.
Sure, it made me feel like I was in one of those batman TV series episodes which usually ended with batman & robin tied up to some kind of ‘death machine’ with the words ‘same time’ ‘same channel’ flashing across the screen in nauseating drippy yellow. But, other than the geeky coolness attached to it, what was the bloody use?
Did it make things simpler, hell no! With a queue of a couple of dozen lined up, it would have been less time consuming to have just gone straight from position 1 to position 3, than wait around for the medically approved merry- go – round to take you there.
All I am saying is, there were better ways of showing that the hospital was tech savvy that that contraption…like INSTALLING AN ELEVATOR FOR INSTANCE!!!
Deep breath.
I hate to have ranted but really, the level of stupidity in that place was something to be experienced.
And, Yes, Mr Wilde, like usual, you’re proven right.
