Whose "stapler" is this?
Post-its and perspectives
The summer before my junior year of college, I worked as an on-call admin in a hospital unit. It was a union job with abundant hours and thrilling overtime pay. I spent most days working double shifts at other people’s desks, gleefully tallying the overtime minutes until my pay tipped into 1.5x, then 2x, my hourly rate.
After my shifts ended at 11pm, I’d party with two brothers who worked as medical assistants and who were also children of a hospital bigwig.
Their house was an unfurnished instance of the suburban tract houses that housed all my childhood friends. I learned that summer that bland beiges and open floor plans are as amenable to large adult bros who take shots in red solo cups as they are to Christian moms who live laugh love.
I spent many a half-night sleeping off my buzz on the couch or in their spare bedroom among various strangers, and what seems miraculous now, from the sober light of my late 30s, is that I experienced zero, and I mean zero, harassment or even discomfort there. Their bare-bones bro pad remains one of the safest spaces I’ve ever been negligent in.
I’d return home at first light, or drive straight back to the hospital for my 6am start, with the kind of plucky energy and crusty mascara that only a 20 year old with no responsibilities and a goal of making $5K in one summer can muster.
One of the desks I regularly worked belonged to a woman I’ll call Maria.
Usually when I sat at someone else’s desk, it was to fill in for a vacation or sick day. But when I sat at Maria’s desk, it was because my special privileges specifically required her displacement.
My mom managed the unit where I was most often called in, and she wasn’t allowed to supervise me (nepotism got a hard pass once you were hired), so Maria would work in my mom’s unit, and I’d take her spot.
Maria, who trained me to displace her, was kind, funny, and methodical. Her desk was decorated with pictures of her exuberant kids and post-its labeling her materials:
Maria’s “Stapler”
Maria’s “Desk”
Maria’s “Post-Its”
At the time, I assumed these stray quotation marks were the skid marks of a cultural mistranslation. In those fluorescent hungover mornings I’d look at those claims and wonder, what is a “stapler,” anyway? Is this really a “desk?” and those questions were less about the mysteries of existence than they were an exercise in finding myself intellectually charming.
I was, after all, an English major, and I was going abroad to debauch and discover myself.
The job at Maria’s “Desk” didn’t usually take the full eight hour shift. Once I’d exhausted the little amount of proactive work that could be done, I’d watch the clock, re-tallying how the overtime would fatten my take home and groaning inwardly at the inefficiency of “The Healthcare System” based on this one admin job whose entire purpose was to be responsive to the whims of ten operating rooms and a quiverfull of surgeons.
Looking back, I cringe at my smugness, at my casual elitism. Had my hipster roommate created those signs, I would have read them as an art installation, a sly provocation about the artifice of language and the relationship between labor and power. I’d ask who the work belonged to, and who it served.
Because, of course, none of it belonged to Maria: not the stapler, not her desk, not her time, not even her union job.
Those post-its were flimsy defenses against the inevitability that some pulmonologist would walk off with her pens or a careless college kid would colonize her chair.
A smattering of links & one good meme
🤩 Prepare to be mesmerized.
👏 What good is millions of Americans running millions of individual races against one another?
😱 The data on who speaks in movies is … damning. But presented in pretty charts! She did all the work but he’s the author? Wives ought to be led with a firm hand.
😆 Just impeccable hand-ass riffing.
