“George,” said the man pulling up in front of the reception desk, “you gotta help me.”
“Ah, my old friend Henry Schwartz,” said the man behind the desk.
“We’re always ready to help the accounting department. After all, that’s where our checks come from. What can I do for you?”
Susan carefully penciled in “Henry Schwartz” onto her own form in the box for the requesting party. In the area for authorizing department, Susan wrote “Accounting.”
“I need a couple of things, but most of all I need a list of all the Blue Cross-Blue Shield subscribers who have had surgery in the last year,”
said Schwartz in a rapid-fire fashion. “If you asked why I need it, you’d crack up, I swear you would. But I need it and fast. The day shift was supposed to have had it ready for me.”
“We can run it in an hour or so. I’ll have it for you by seven,” said George, stapling Schwartz’s requests together and tossing them into the box.
“George, you’re a lifesaver,” said Schwartz, running his hand through his hair over and over again. He then headed toward the elevator. “I’ll be back at seven sharp.”
Susan watched Schwartz press the “down” button and then walk back and forth in the elevator foyer. It looked as if he was talking to himself.
He hit the “down” button several more times. After the elevator picked him up, Susan watched the floor indicator above the elevator. It stopped at six, then three, then one. Susan would have to look up which floor the accounting department was located on.
Susan took another blank request form and, carefully placing it over her own, she headed for the desk.
“Excuse me,” said Susan, marshaling a smile she hoped would be convincing. George looked up at her, over the tops of his black-rimmed glasses, which perched midway down his nose. “I’m a medical student,”
continued Susan, making her voice as sweet as possible, “and I’m very interested in the computer here at the hospital.” She held up the request forms, the blank one hiding the one she had filled out.
“You are, are you?” said George, sitting back with a smile broadening on his own face.
“I am,” repeated Susan shaking her head in the affirmative. “I think that the potential of the computer in medicine is very great, and since it is obviously not a part of our formal orientation here, I thought I’d just come up and sort of get acquainted.”
George looked at Susan, then over his shoulder through the glass partition at the gleaming IBM hardware. When he turned back to Susan his pride was effervescing.
“It’s a marvelous set up, Miss ...”
“Susan Wheeler.”
“It is a fantastic machine, Miss Wheeler,” said George, leaning forward in his seat and lowering his voice and emphasizing his words, suggesting that he was telling Susan a tremendous secret. “The hospital couldn’t do without it.”
“In order to get an idea how it is used, I’ve been studying the request form here.” Susan held the request forms so that George would see only the blank one, but he had turned again to look into the terminal room.
“I was interested to see a completed form,” continued Susan reaching over and taking the top group of stapled forms from the “in” box. “I was curious about how the requests were fed into the computer. Is it all right if I look at one of these?” She placed the forms Schwartz had delivered over her own.
“Sure,” said George turning back to Susan. He stood up and leaned over toward Susan, placing his left hand on the desk. With his other hand he pointed to the space where the request was written in normal English.
“Here the requesting party indicates what it is they want. Then down here ...” George’s finger moved down below the red lines “... we have the area where the request is translated into a language that the computer will understand.”
Susan slipped her blank form from under the pile of Schwartz’s forms, as if comparing them and she put it down on the desk beside them—
leaving her own filled-out form beneath Schwartz’s.
“So if someone wants several different kinds of information, they have to fill out separate forms?” asked Susan.
“Exactly, and if ...”
Susan turned Schwartz’s first request form back from the rest of them rapidly, pulling it free of the staple in the upper left corner.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” said Susan putting the top sheet back in position. “Look what I’ve done. Let me staple it for you.”
“No matter,” said George, fumbling for the staple machine himself.
“One staple will fix it.” George pressed the staple machine as Susan held the completed forms, together with her own request on the underside.
“Let me put these back before I destroy them completely,” said Susan contritely, replacing the forms in the “in” box.
“No harm done,” reassured George.
“Now once the request is in, what happens to it?” asked Susan looking into the terminal room and taking George’s attention from the “in” box.
“Well, I take them inside to the key puncher, who prepares the cards for the card reader. Then ...”
Susan was not listening; she was thinking of how best to terminate her visit. About five minutes later she was down at the directory for the hospital, looking up Henry Schwartz of the accounting department.
With a spare hour and a half, Susan left the Memorial for her dorm.
Her stomach growled in opposition to her forgetfulness of basic needs.
The tuna sandwich, as bad as it was, had long since disappeared into her metabolic mill, and Susan looked forward to dinner.
Monday, February 23, 6:55 P.M.
It was a little before seven when Susan alighted from the MBTA at the North Station stop. Crossing the footbridge spanning the street, Susan was exposed to the rush of wind whipping up from the partially frozen harbor water. She bent against its force, clutching her sheepskin ski hat with her left hand and the lapels of her peajacket with her right hand.
She tried to keep the cold from her neck by snuggling her chin as far as possible into the recesses of her collar.
When she rounded the edge of the building, the wind increased. An empty beer can tumbled past her into the street. The familiar rush hour sea of red taillights and wisps of exhaust fumes stretched as far as Susan could see. The windows on the cars were frosted, and they reflected the images about them with a silver sheen, giving the impression of the often white, unseeing pupils of the blind.
Susan began to run at a slow jog with an exaggerated to and fro roll of her body since her arms were pressed against herself. The main entrance to the hospital yawned in front of her, and with relief she pushed through the revolving door.
Susan stuffed her hat into the right sleeve of her coat and left it in the coatroom behind the main information desk. Then she used the hospital telephone directory and rang up the computer center.
“Hello, this is the accounting department,” said Susan slightly out of breath and struggling to make her voice sound normal. “Has Mr. Schwartz picked up his material yet?”
The answer was affirmative; he had collected it about five minutes earlier. The timing seemed perfect as far as Susan was concerned, and she left for the Hardy building elevator and the third floor accounting offices.
The evening accounting crew was a mere skeleton compared to the day shift. When Susan entered the room only three people were visible at the far end. Two men and one woman looked up in unison as Susan entered.
“Excuse me,” called Susan, approaching the group. “Can you tell me where I can find Mr. Schwartz?”
“Schwartz? Sure. He’s in the office in the corner,” said one of the men, pointing down the opposite side of the room.
Susan’s eyes followed his finger. “Thanks,” she said, reversing her direction.
