Oddities

I think I'd like to write a book. Maybe not now, or two years from now, but some day. I file away so many details about people and things that I see, and I have so many ideas for characters tucked away in my brain. True-life fictional characters, if you will. For instance, there's a woman I work with who plods in night after night, dragging her rolling suitcase behind her (which is chock full of goodies, I'm sure). Most nights when I walk through the door to my department, I find her suitcase parked in the hallway across from the time card room. Every night it's the same. She walks in, leaves the suitcase in the hall, stamps her time card, then walks down a few rooms to retrieve her pager from the office. Then it's back out to the hall, where she picks up her rolling bag before making her way up to her unit via the elevator. I mention the elevator because I've never seen her use the stairs (it is, after all, only one short flight up). And maybe the elevator is just practical, seeing as how she carries a bulky bag, but still...the same thing, night after night. (Me, I live on the edge...stairs one night, elevator the next. Woo! I'm a traveling wild card.)  

At any rate, I've often wondered what kind of person she really is. Perhaps she leads a tumultuous life outside of work, but I don't think I'll ever find out. Because every time I pass her in the halls, she avoids eye contact until the very last minute, and then only allows a shy sideways glance if I've literally stared her down. Her greetings are only uttered in response to mine, and whenever I've attempted to converse, she's been polite but evasive. I don't get the sense that she has any sort of aversion to me, I just don't think she really talks to anyone. What exactly DOES she think about? Who does she live with, if anyone, and what does she do outside of work? Is there a family waiting for her when she gets home in the morning? What kinds of odds and ends does she carry around in that suitcase of hers? Books? Rubber chickens? Manilla envelopes? I wonder...

In other news, tonight one of the techs found an enormous beetle in one of the patient's rooms. I sincerely hope that the patient was fast asleep during the discovery/capture process, since this thing was gross and would have been a disturbing sight to awaken to. Shortly after I paged the housekeeper, he arrived and picked up said insect, but not before insisting that it couldn't possibly be any larger than some that he'd seen while living in Kentucky. Some of those were "bigger than his fist," apparently. I didn't really know how to respond to that comment. I was equally speechless when he mentioned that he'd take it home and feed it to his snake, although I did nod along with that remark, thinking to myself that he is exactly the type of person I would expect to own a snake. Not that I have anything against snake owners, of course -- Sammy used to be one. In fact, he still has a box of snake skins on a shelf in his old room at his parents' house. (Wowza.) But you know what kind of person I'm talking about. The kind that tells a stranger about his giant insect collection back in Kentucky. That kind.