| 第 1 页：英语原文 |
| 第 2 页：中文翻译 |
About 25 years ago, I worked as an orderly on the overnight shift in a South Carolina hospital to put myself through school. The building we were in at the time was one of those WPA jobs from the Roosevelt era, and even though it was small and somewhat outmoded, it had been the only place for emergency services in our county for more than 40 years. But at the time this incident I’m writing about happened, a new, state-of-the-art hospital had just been finished a few miles down the highway, and while we weren’t completely out of the picture, a lot of our services, including the emergency room, had been shifted to that site.
Like I say, I was working my way through school at the time, and my shift generally ran weeknights from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. There wasn’t a whole lot to do after midnight, so sometimes after the shift supervisor had run out of creative ideas for make-work, and assuming our remaining patients were quiet and settled in for the night, she’d let me “relax” with my schoolwork in the employee lounge during the quiet of the wee hours.
The lounge was right next to the second floor nurses’ station.
