Britches

I am afraid that the longer I work at Shady Grove, the less aware I become of the hilarity that surrounds me. To avoid forgetting the day-to-day amusements, I am going to try documenting them.

The first one is that I frequently am asked by residents to assist them. Whether or not they mistake me for a CNA I'm not sure, but nonetheless the residents consistently try to seduce me into doing odd things for them. I fall for it every time. I can't ignore their yelps for assistance, and I always get there before the CNA does. Just today I wheeled a woman to her bedroom only to have her ask me to undress her.

All I can do is politely inform them that I am merely a housekeeper and that they need to wait for a CNA to assist them further. But to tell you the truth, I'm pretty sure they know I'm a housekeeper, and are just desperate/impatient.

When it comes to wails emanating from the bathrooms, I stay far away. If I get asked to wheel someone to the bathroom, I wheel 'em and ditch 'em. It's only my job to clean up the mess afterwards. Which brings me to my next observation.

Does everyone recall that scene from 'Daddy Daycare' where a little boy attempts to pee unassisted for the first time, comes out saying "I missed," after which Eddie Murphy looks up at the ceiling with horror? That's me every day that I clean bathrooms. I catch myself saying "How does this even happen??" about three times a day. I love that the residents claim to be wheelchair-bound, but in reality are flexible enough to leave stains in just about every crevice of the stall.

Also something that I may never understand, is these people's ability to fall asleep in the middle of eating their food. One lady takes three hours every single day to eat lunch. She gets there an hour early, and stays an hour late. The reason it takes her so long is because she falls asleep, sometimes with a spoon still held up to her mouth. But you must give her efficiency-points for her use of a spoon to skewer her dinner roll in an attempt to eat faster. I think another part of the problem is her incessant flirting. One cannot possibly consume an entire meal, while fishing for a new boyfriend, in just an hour. These things take time. Especially if you are consistently falling asleep.

This same woman stopped me just yesterday to complain about the hard-boiled egg she was eating.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"I want to eat THIS part of the egg (pointing at the yolk), but I don't want all this FAT around it" she tells me.

It seems I don't know much about eggs, but apparently the egg whites are very fattening. Why a woman at her age, who just last week assured us that she was going to die, cares about fat, I don't know. But as I walked away without knowing how to comfort her, I got to witness her telling another person the exact same thing, desperate for some help with her serious egg problem.