Ostomy Memories of a Hospital Bureaucrat

ONE DAY IN THE SMALL Kanab, Utah hospital, I encountered the legendary faceless bureaucrat. I was reclining comfortably in a hospital bed, getting IVs to overcome persistent dehydration caused by my chronic renal issues, when a nurse entered. She had noticed earlier in the day that I had brought my prescribed meds in with me and had mentioned it to the hospital pharmacist. He had sent her to my room with a mission.
“Our pharmacist wants me to get your pills so that he can see them.”
“Why is that?”
“He wants to make sure that we don’t give you the wrong thing.”
“That’s not a problem. I don’t need you to give me anything. I have what I need.”
“Well, I need to take them down to him.”
“Tell him to come get them himself. Tell him that he’s not going to get them though.”
I knew damned well why he wanted to confiscate my meds. Instead of letting me take my own pills, which cost a small fraction of a dollar apiece, he wanted to provide them himself and charge me ten bucks each. That was the hospital rule, the normal practice, the procedure they obliged their patients to accept.
For a bureaucrat, procedure is all and the purpose of the procedure, its original raison d’être, has long since faded into the obscure and simple recesses of his pea brain. In short, it no longer matters. This small town pharmacist was an amateur bureaucrat striving to be a professional.
Frank Lloyd Wright once said of bureaucrats that “they are like custard pies; you can’t nail them to the wall.” I was eventually discharged without the pharmacist ever showing his face in my room.

Hello HenryM.

Thank you for raising the subject of bureaucrats who, of course, are often to be found working in bureaucracies.
One of my very first books of rhyme was entitled ‘Poor little Independent me -verses- The Great Bureaucracy’.
In it, I tried to make sense of the many nonsensical behaviours and associated reasoning behind their decision making and ‘game-playing’.
Years later, I began to realise that much of what they do is equivalent to ‘covert-bullying’ where the bullies have institutionalized their behaviour and made up their own ‘rules’ to the dishonest games they play. This strategy is possibly so that they cannot be accused of it first-hand.
The concept of game-playing was eloquently exposed by Eric Byrne in his (now classic) book ‘Games People Play’. I particularly liked his comment in the introduction, where he said that basically all game-playing is ‘dishonest’, in that the ‘victim’ often doesn’t know they are in a ‘game’ and the ‘rules’ are made up to suit the perpetrators.
I leave you with one of my early rhymes on this subject:

Best wishes
Bill

CLEVER GAMES.
I have witnessed clever games
where certain things remain the same,
yet cunning player with true aim
will know precisely what’s the gain.

Oft I wonder, why some stay
so unaware of crafty ways,
of devious players and their play
blithely ignorant of what they pay.

Sympathy just does not wash
with ‘winners’, who don’t give a toss.
where losers do not know they’ve lost
so, don’t begin to count the cost.

So, what, the morals of the ones
who know full-well what they have done,
who come, and come, and come, and come,
to see what else that can be ‘won’.

Can it be that they’re in need,
or is it EGOs that they feed?
Why do, in print, I often read
Encouragement to further greed?

Would it help, if I explained
to the victims of these games?
Or would the effort be in vain
for those who do not feel the pain?

Perhaps the anguish is all mine,
to watch the players so entwined.
Perhaps in nature’s way that’s fine,
as cat has mouse on which to dine.

Clever games are played by them,
who will portray as gracious friend,
and yet we know about their trend
to put-one-over in the end.

                                           B. Withers 1988

Good stuff, Bill.  It's widely recognized that nothing is more important to a functionary than his function.