Waiter Rant Read Online Free PDF Page A

cup of coffee my boss walked into my office and broke the news that our clinic had been bought out by that other company. My position had become redundant. I was being laid off.
    Professional gunmen have a little maneuver they call the “Mozambique Drill.” That’s when they put two rounds into some poor slob’s chest and then, just to make sure he’s dead, shoot him in the head. Well, my boss had just delivered the third shot. I could handle losing my girlfriend. I could handle losing Kevin. I could handle losing my job. But I couldn’t handle losing all three things at the same time. I was down for the count. I walked out of the office feeling abandoned and lost. I felt like that song was coming to life. “I close my eyes and fly out of my mind / The world is burning down.”
    And I almost did fly out of my mind. I had a mini–nervous breakdown, saw a shrink, and started popping Zoloft like M&M’s. I also spent six fruitless months looking for a new job. Just before my unemployment benefits were due to run out I was offered the position of marketing director for a geriatric outpatient clinic opening up in an inner-city hospital. I didn’t know squat about being a marketing rep or opening a clinic, but the job paid well, so I jumped all over it. It was hard work, but within a few months the clinical director and I had the place up and running. The staff we hired was top notch, and the senior citizens we treated got excellent care. The only problem? There were never enough patients.
    The hospital that housed our clinic was in a bad neighborhood. Latin King gang members stabbed a kid to death outside our ER in broad daylight. A low-rent go-go bar was visible frommy office. Trying to convince nervous grandmas to come to the ghetto for treatment was a tough sell. Several other hospitals in the area had similar programs, so competition for the shrinking Medicare pie was cutthroat and fraud was rampant. Unscrupulous marketing reps trolled nursing homes in order to stuff their programs with Alzheimer’s patients and bill bingo games as group therapy. I didn’t want to play that game. Neither did my therapists. We were honest.
    The reward for our righteousness was a low patient census. When you’re a health care marketer, you live and die by the census. Some days we’d have twenty patients, and other days we’d have two. I spent hours languishing in waiting rooms trying to persuade doctors to choose my clinic over others and suffered through countless sales lunches with power-mad nursing home administrators who wanted only to gobble up expense-account-subsidized food. Eventually the low census drove my corporate overlords crazy. By the middle of my second year the powers that be were calling for my head.
    The outfit I worked for operated a swath of psychiatric clinics throughout the region. Like every American company in 1999 with more than five employees, they were dreaming about going public. Drunk on New Economy Kool-Aid, the higher-ups droned catchphrases such as “best practices” and “due diligence” like cultic mantras and were so busy dreaming about stock options and yacht clubs that they forgot to attend to small details like ethics. The last straw came when one of the regional VPs started insisting we admit mentally retarded people into our program, technically a violation of Medicare law. Just like at the seminary and in my previous job, I once again found myself surrounded by well-educated people who looked good, said the right things, and behaved dishonestly. The therapists and I refused to cave in to their demands. The company decided to get rid of me.
    Because the company was scared of lawsuits, they didn’t fire me right away. Instead, they took their sweet time, drafting warning letters for my personnel file and waging a rather cynicalcampaign to prove that I was incompetent. At that point I probably was incompetent. I had tried being a good corporate soldier, but the office politics wore down my