“Well, maybe that’s just the way she has to be in her position,” Lisa suddenly found herself very graciously reasoning, and with that, she momentarily forgot about all of the gripes that she was accustomed to rerun in her head throughout the day to help her pass the time. Lisa, in fact, did have a laundry list of complaints about her volunteering job and Mrs. Raleigh, but the worst among them were the horrible affronts to her sense of style.
“No long nails on anyone working on my floor!” Mrs. Raleigh’s voice echoed in Lisa’s head from the very first day she walked in and introduced herself as the new candy striper assigned to the fourth floor. Lisa was forced to go into the bathroom and cut off her new one-of-a-kind manicure that she just had done the day before. No one had even gotten to see it before she had to carry out that painful order. To top it off, when she was handed her candy striper uniform, she was told that she would have to wear it whenever she was on duty.
“No exceptions and no excuses!”was all that Mrs. Raleigh had to say on that count. Well, that didn’t leave much room for compromise, let alone discussion.
“What does anyone care how I dress?” was the mantra that Lisa would silently fume to herself. On occasion she would even gripe about it quite vocally, just for effect, but it fell on deaf ears; nobody relinquished the ‘you must show up in your uniform’ rule. Lisa did not want people to say that she had special privileges, because her parents were surgeons in the hospital, so she adhered to the rules with a lot of misgiving. Lisa knew though, that Mrs. Raleigh was doing very important work. She could not help but to appreciate her compassion for the patients and their families, her efficiency at her job and her never failing work ethic. These qualities had won her Lisa’s loyalty and obedience. Lisa wanted to have Mrs. Raleigh’s respect and make her parents proud too, especially since she was already committed to doing the job, yet she could easily do without the hours of bedpan duty, the cranky patients and the fact that every time she went to the hospital to volunteer, it looked like she was trying to impersonate a candy cane. In the end, all of this did not matter too much to her, because in spite of it all, she actually did enjoy helping people. In fact, just that she was always able to find a reason to complain about it was possibly the most agreeable part of it to her, and that in itself was enough motivation to persevere.
Continued
