Saturday, January 31, 2015

Decaying standards for public-service announcements

(From the Exciting Pictures department)

When you’re doing hospital duty and dealing round the clock with red-tapism, miscommunication, unfathomable billing procedures, blank-faced nurses and untraceable doctors, when ward boys giggle at each other in Malayalam upon seeing you scald your hand at a water dispenser, and when the sole bright spark in your day is being able to say a firm No to the Spinach-Corn-Cheese-Burst Dosa at the hospital's Sagar Ratna, this is not the sort of image you hope to be confronted with:



The very walls are mocking me now, you think (because by this time you feel like you’ve been decomposing for days, and you aren’t even dead) – but then your eye takes in the full picture and all is well again, at least for a few seconds:


(Another good thing about this is, it encourages you to while your time away by making up number problems, e.g. If you put six plastic bottles, a paper towel and a banana peel into a plastic bag and leave it out in the open for a thousand years, will it be possible to locate the right doctor by the end of that time? And can you go home?)

3 comments:

  1. Hope you feel better soon or if it is someone else you are there for at the hospital, hope they get better soon and get to go home.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Extremely funny, this part – “because by this time you feel like you’ve been decomposing for days, and you aren’t even dead”! I expected the number problem to be highly complex, in the vein of Shakuntala Devi!

    ReplyDelete
  3. +1 with Dancing Fingers

    ReplyDelete