diversity

I was going to do a round up of the pluses and minuses of today in here, but I got distracted by one of the projected plus/minuses onto another mental topic. So you're going to hear about that instead. I promise, it may not be riveting, but it'll be better than listening to me whine about what the traffic in Salem is like during the month of October, n'est pas?

Okay. So some of you have already heard my lament about how they are renovating our cafeteria in work and thus my already meager lunch choices are even more reduced. Mostly we're down to premade sandwiches and salads. That's a minus. Well, at 12:15 today, I got the very last Greek salad they had. That's a plus. When I took it up to pay, my very nice butch cashier pointed out that it was looking kind of sad and wilted--that's a minus--though it had today's date on it, and asked if I wanted to get something else instead, or to grab a plain garden salad and transfer my feta and olives, etc., to that. I told her it was okay, I'd take my chances on the semi-wilted lettuce. She said "hold on," checked out the next person in line, and with her cash drawer open, took my five out and handed it back to me. I got a free lunch that I would have paid for without complaint, thanks to her kindness. That's a plus!

And it occurred to me as I was thinking about writing about this incident that absolutely my inclination was to describe her as "my butch cashier" solely because it is so very very unusual in my workplace to come across an employee who looks at all, shall we say, alternative. This girl is fairly new and I remember being really surprised the first day I went through her line. She is probably the one and only employee of the hospital that I have come across whose sexual orientation is clearly flagged by her dress and appearance. It's bizarre; obviously just by percentages there have got to be a good chunk of lesbian and gay employees, but the only ones that I know of I know of from being told, not because they don't "blend" seamlessly. Contrast that to, say, massage school, which was close to 50-50 gay/straight with the students and almost all lesbian/gay with the instructors and the visual clues mostly held true.

Similarly, and coincidentally, I overheard two guys that work in the ER walking down the hall, discussing that fact that one of them had brand new, extensive forearm tats and is apparently getting shit about it. His friend said, gesturing to his own rather visible tattoos, "Hey, they can't say anything to me, because they hired me like this." And it occurred to me that I just never even thought that people would need to hide/cover their bodyart to work at the hospital. Because it *isn't* a three-piece-suit environment, it just never occurred to me that it would be that conservative, that a man, in particular, would get crap for visible tattoos. Would you care if your nurse had half-sleeves if he appeared to know how to get your IV in on the first try?

I guess when I stopped to think about it, it really kind of bothered me that it seems for the most part the hospital avoids hiring anyone who appears to have an alternative sexuality or who has extensive bodyart. It seems weird in 2008. You can tell me it's because they don't want to make the little old lady patients uncomfortable, but I think that's selling the little old lady patients short. I bet a whole crapload of them go to swishy gay hairdressers and butch lesbian MTs (and love them!) and fondly roll their eyes and shake their heads over their own grandchildren's full-sleeves and nostril piercings (and love them too!) They don't go running out of the coffee shop screaming if the barista has pink hair. This is Boston, not small town Utah, you know?

Am I totally off-base?

xoxo