Communication

One of the great boons of working with administrators in a big organization is the chance to learn from them. The fact is, administrators always seem to be miraculous eye-openers. Just asking for something that requires money is usually crime enough under their draconian policy. They don't always turn you down – that depends on how you define it.

I have found numerous such eye-opening examples in the Yes Minister series, and – believe me – they are undeniably fascinating and entertaining. One of the stories goes that Health Service Administration replied to the hospital like this: "Because of the current supply situation it is not possible to issue you with the extra stethoscopes you have applied for. We are, however, in a position to supply you with longer tubes for your existing stethoscopes." The administrators then went so far as to suggest that it could save a lot of wear and tear on the doctors – with sufficiently long tubes for their stethoscopes, they suggested, they could stand in one place and listen to all the chests on the ward.

This is curious, but there is much more curious thing going on around us. I recall with pristine clarity my experience of applying for four cordless phones from our hospital administrators in order to help our medical interns. I talked about the busy extended night shift when our poor interns keep running to and fro, drenched with sweat, their weary lives impoverished by the beepers shouting in bursts. I then suggested that the cordless phones will make the situation less chaotic for our interns in the middle of the night, when the hospital telephone operators are half asleep.

Two days later we received a note from the administrators, who saw no objection to the utmost importance for interns to return beeper calls with telephones. They told us, nevertheless, that the proper way should be to provide the intern rooms with landline phones, instead of cordless phones. As for me, and my sort of brain, I can't figure out the logic. Good gracious! Our interns are schlepping throughout the hospital during the night shift, instead of drinking coffee and answering phone calls at their rooms. The only way their counterproposal can help is to let us live with the illusion that our interns are staying in their rooms for nap. (Often, they can't.)

Finding your request unreasonable in every way imaginable, they come up with astonishing decision, to which you would have difficulty in understanding, not to mention rebuttal. The administrators are, in my mentor's parlance, creatures who have emigrated to Pluto. In short, for reasons too difficult to explain, or impossible to explain, they do not understand a whit what we speak on this planet. And vice versa.

I have not the slightest notion what goes on in the mind of administrators, beyond the conviction that it represents a mind totally beyond my capacity. Just as the administrators are able to make suggestion that I cannot imagine, and smell important things of which I'm unaware, I have a hunch that I can never become an administrator.