Dismantling More Big Things
It's two-thirty in the morning again.
Somehow this time always manages to come back around, and it always seems to stay longer than it should. It's a black hole of minute hands, Einstein's basketball on the sheet of the night shift - the Rome of the darkness hours. Sooner or later, all times lead to two-thirty.
And there's always somebody awake. I'll miss that when everyone leaves on Monday. You never know who you'll see wandering through the dining room in the middle of the night. Tonight, people are still up signing each other's little memory books in anticipation of the coming departures.
And the packing goes on. Last Friday we hauled all the surgical equipment up out of Medical. Now, Medical is about as deep in the ship as you can go without unbolting a manhole. It's at the bottom of a narrow, three-floor square staircase with seven separate landings. Any self-respecting surgeon involved would have been apoplectic, but hey, if surgeons were moving it, the stuff would still be down there. There were a few nurses watching, but they'd all been on outreach before. Nurses know what's up.
See, these were large pieces of equipment, and unreasonably heavy. My personal feeling is that useful objects should either be heavy and tough or light and delicate. Heavy and delicate is against the principle of things. It just violates the spirit of it all. Naturally, everything we had to move last week was gargantuan, absurdly expensive, and calibrated with the most exquisite sensitivity. We manhandled it all straight up two vertical stories, cargo-strapped, with three people hanging all their weight on a block and tackle and five more to drag it up over the rails. Working in the deck department does have its moments.
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