That same day, Bob called. When he heard about my promotion, he invited me to come to the Press Club to celebrate. Feeling high on excitement, I agreed and called Raj to give her the news about my promotion. “I’m going to be home a little late since I’m going to stop and have a beer with Bob,” I added.
Once at the bar, things got out of hand. People were buying me drinks left and right. I felt that after so much hard work, I deserved to relax and let go. When I finally returned to the apartment late that evening, I stumbled through the door, laughing and singing drunkenly.
Raj glared at me.
“You’re gone all day, leaving me to take care of Subhash all by myself, and then you come home like this?” she snapped.
I stopped in my tracks. Raj had never raised her voice before. In the next moment, Raj broke into tears.
“I’m so sorry, Raj,” I said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
She continued to cry and wouldn’t look at me.
“We were celebrating,” I explained. “Things got a little crazy.”
I kept apologizing, but it didn’t matter what I said. For the rest of the evening, we sat quietly at opposite ends of the room. I had anticipated celebrating my promotion with Raj, but I did not realize my actions would make her so angry.
Chapter 16
As assistant administrator over the SPD department, it became my responsibility to make sure that SPD provided efficient services to the patient floors and other departments. SPD, located on the basement level, had a bad reputation in this regard. All the upper departments referred to it as “Stupid People Downstairs.” Since I was in charge of SPD, I did not like this term. Although there was not much I could do about it, I was determined to change its image by making as many improvements to SPD as I could. Once we started giving timely, more efficient service, the image would correct itself.
First and foremost, I tackled “Mount Hopeless,” the giant mound of soiled laundry that perpetually sat in the reprocessing section. There was so much backlog that the reprocessing employees could not keep up with it, and one employee, a slightly mentally challenged person but still a good worker, put a sign near it on which he had written, with creative spelling, “Mount Hopless.”
Due to the enormous backlog, the nurses constantly yelled at the Laundry Department because they continually ran out of clean linens. Having experience in this area from my laundry project at St. Elizabeth Hospital, I began observing the reprocessing section’s methods right away. Currently, they utilized a specific formula for all the various types of linens that came through the reprocessing section, the area that contained the laundry washer and extractor. This formula had been set to a sixty-minute cycle required for heavily soiled linens. After studying how many pounds of laundry were to be reprocessed on a daily basis, I realized there would always be a backlog, and the employee who ran the machines during an eight-hour shift Monday through Friday would never catch up.
I set a goal to shorten the laundry washing time and still provide clean linens to the patient floor. Working with a sales rep from the American Laundry Company (who designed the formulas for the machines), we were able to incorporate three different formulas by classifying the linens into three groups: surgical linens, heavily soiled linens, and moderately soiled linens. I noted that not all of the linens were heavily soiled. By washing these separately, we could reduce the washing time for each load, meaning we could redistribute these linens to the patient floors more quickly. By implementing these formulas, we would be able to wash all the soiled laundry on a daily basis in an eight-hour shift Monday thru Friday.
However, there was still the matter of “Mount Hopeless.” Mr. Gilreath approved my request for employees to work overtime to wash the entire backlog of laundry. Once people saw the results of my changes, the nurses and reprocessing employees began to have confidence in me.
Yet there was one more issue in the reprocessing section that bothered me. In the entire time Providence Hospital was open, the laundry bags holding all the soiled laundry had never been washed. They looked dirty and bloody, and whenever I went into that area, the room would have a strange, musty odor. There were around seventy to eighty bags, and I calculated that if we washed ten to fifteen bags a week over a five-week period, all the bags would be clean. The reprocessing supervisor agreed with me, but some of the employees didn’t.
One day while I was making my rounds, one employee said, “Mr. Bedi, why do we wash these laundry bags? They are only going to get dirty again.”
“Gee, you have a point,” I said. “But now let me ask you a question. I hope you wear underwear. And probably, you are changing it every day and washing it. Why wash it if it’s going to get dirty again?”
The employee just looked at me and said, “Mr. Bedi, you have a point.”
Later, when I told this story to Mr. Gilreath, he could not stop laughing.
“Kris, what a question!” he laughed, tears in his eyes as he tried to control himself. “Very good example. Very good!”
One Saturday while out shopping with Raj and Subhash, I decided to stop by Providence Hospital to see what was happening in my departments. As I entered the reprocessing area, I was stunned to see four college students playing baseball with a broomstick, while the soiled laundry, dirty dishes, and contaminated instruments were
