Rumours

You slink down the hallway away from Jayne’s office. Instead of taking the stairwell right close you aimlessly walk down to the other end of the building. Even with her door closed, you don’t want to pass by her office.

You barely start down the hall when the woman with the small office two doors down steps out and sees you.

“Did you hear some yelling?” She asks, her curiosity plain. “I had my earbuds in but I thought I heard loud voices. Not necessarily from your office,” she adds, unconvincing, “but just from down this way.” She gestures vaguely at your office.

Matilde Tremblay, or Mati as most people call her, is a pleasant woman a few years older than you from a Francophone community near the border with Quebec. She’s quite personable but you know she’s a shameless gossip. There was no chance she wasn’t standing by her doorway trying to figure out what was going on and just so happened to pop out when she heard you coming.

“Uh I don’t know,” you say, having trouble looking her in the eye.

“Ah,” is all Mati says, her eyes scanning your face like a cop interrogating a man spattered in blood. You walk past her, fully aware she’s going to assume that Jayne was angry talking at you before slamming her door. She’ll be right, even if all the other assumptions she makes after that won’t be.

As you walk out of the hallway into the large open area where the roving public health nurses are you realize your mistake. Instantly 20 pairs of eyes snap to you, and a few women openly start whispering to each other. Some just seem curious, some clearly have no idea what’s going on, and some look downright hostile at you. Oh god, how loud was Jayne talking? You turn beet red, which must just make it even more clear to everyone that you did something that made your work wife angry at you. Even if only a few of them at the table closest to your office heard the rest of them will know in the time it takes you to leave the building.

Honestly, leaving the building sounds like a great idea. You walk past the open area, trying to ignore the swell of delighted whispering as soon as your back is turned. In the stairwell you head to the ground level and the main entrance of Bathurst Health Centre, feeling a numb pain. You had to tell her! You couldn’t just ignore the TAM!

Granted, you probably could have done a much better job of explaining it. You should have spent more time telling her that you didn’t create or enter any data into the system, that might have prepared her to focus on the sheer weirdness of it instead of being mad at you for whatever reason she was mad. Probably disturbed at seeing it in action. Perhaps she thought you were playing a really mean prank of some kind. She was definitely embarrassed to see her name with ‘love’ and ‘lust’ scores, and who could blame her?

But let’s be honest, she really didn’t seem to enjoy seeing Karissa’s name there.

But now here you are, feeling as bad as you have in years. Well the pain and sadness you feel is nothing at all compared to some things that have happened to you, so with grim humour you tell yourself that at least you have plenty of far worse memories to distract you from your current situation. Shit, your hospital stay last year contained a thousand worse feelings and that only lasted 4 days.

You don’t think of London and your former marriage, or even your old life before you got out of the hospital, very much now. Well, you think of it every day of course, all of it, but only in very careful ways you’ve learned from a series of professionals. But now regret and loss and pain are rising in you, and you can’t stop thinking about how Jayne just looked at you with such hurt in her eyes. She’s definitely been let down by a guy before, you can just tell. Something about her expression spoke eloquently of being disappointed in love, of finding a lover has been unfaithful or something. And then looking at you with an expression that just said, ‘you too?’

Exiting the stairwell on the first floor, you’re about to enter the lobby when you see an older man approaching you.

“Ah Zachary! What luck!” Dr. Dustin Goodall is one of the general practitioners who still sees patients in the walk-in clinic. Nearly 70, he’s still active and clearly beloved by the community. Sadly, he can barely turn a computer on let alone use it, and in this day and age that’s a problem. His poor clerks and nurses end up having to do a lot of things he should be doing himself, but he’s such a gentleman and a good doctor no one complains. He should be out sleeping beside a lake pretending to fish, but instead he’s working long hours treating croupy infants and suspicious rashes.

Glad for the distraction, you nod and say, “Hey Dr. Goodall. Need anything?”

With an embarrassed chuckle, he replies, “Well yes I’m afraid. You know how you showed me the way to add blood work results and X-rays to a patient record? Well I tried that again this morning and now both are gone! I hate to ask, but can you take a look?”

This should absolutely be something he calls Service Desk for. They can help him remotely a lot of the time, and that way his issue gets tracked. And besides, you’re Networks, helping with this sort of thing isn’t really your specialty. But you’ve never felt comfortable not trying to help users with their application issues or hardware problems. Let’s face it, your actual job is easy as hell. The least you can do is help kindly old doctors provide better patient care without being a stickler for the rules about it.

“Well I have some time right now Doc, is your office free?” It is and he brings you to his computer, which he looks at like a feral dog chained to his desk.

Your mind really needed this, an opportunity to just focus on simple work for 10 minutes. You quickly find the ‘lost’ files and show the doctor how to add it electronically. It probably won’t matter, but he does actually pay attention and is grateful for the help so just for that he’s infinitely less annoying than some of the doctors are. One of your first days at work you were standing near the clinic rooms and one of the doctors came out, frowning at his cell phone, and then without even a glance at you he tossed the phone and told you to return the page before storming off to yell at a nurse.

With Dr. Goodall's computer issue solved - and as usual the 'issue' was Dr. Goodall - you leave his office and start walking through the waiting room.

One of the old ladies waiting is loudly talking to a clerk, saying, “Is it true the clinic will be closing?”

Shrugging like someone who has fielded the question before, the clerk replies, “I really don’t know anything about that ma’am, no one has told us anything.”

“This is the only walk-in for blocks and blocks! And if it closes to get my tests done I’ll have to take a bus all the way down to Toronto General, that would take an hour!”

“Well, let’s hope it doesn’t happen. Which doctor are you here to see today?” You walk through the waiting room and into the lobby, and finally are out the door into the bright sunshine of a lovely summer day.

Yep, a perfect, gorgeous horrible fucking beast of a day, and it’s not even 10:30 yet.