What's Your Lifeline?

I have to start off by saying that I work in a place that no one would expect to find me; A place filled with needles and centrifuges, blood and labcoats. However, this place has become my home away from home where the everyday mundane turns into comical relief. I have found that I laugh more here in one day than I ever did for the 7 months that I worked at my first "big girl" job out of college. I can't count the number of times we are sitting in the break room laughing until we cry because someone has mentioned something completely random and out of place. Picture this scene...

Cell phone game sounds are chirping a losing battle against the only male coworker crazy enough to blend in to this fiasco of menopausal, hot-flashing women and hyper-active, silly young ladies. In fact, there are only four men that I know of that work in this entire center, and most of them keep their distance to avoid being called on to lift a box that has been stuffed with more than two-times its capacity of paperwork, or to reach that tippy-top shelf of the storage closet because the one thing that is needed out of there in the past 4 months is always on that top shelf. I personally think that these women throw things up on that shelf just to laugh at the men they must call on to reach the stuff.

My Indian lab partner is also in the background jamming out to her "Indie Pop" music and telling me how ridiculously slow I am for such a bright American. By the way, she thinks all Americans are slow, but she works at a pace that can only be described by the revving of NASCAR racecar engines. Never in my life have I seen someone work so diligently with a concentration that cannot be broken. I respect her for that.

Beside me in the breakroom is the infamous Kay. She is quite the character. This post-menopausal lady hallucinates while working on platelet counts and CBCs. She sees chickens and roosters as she gazes out the window into the apartment complex next to the center. As she gazes, she slowly drifts off into a deep sleep that is only broken up by the sounds of the invisible chickens clucking, or her own adenaline rush as she grasps for anything to grab a hold of becuase she has nodded off a little too far! Last time, she grabbed the keyboard to the CBC computer so hard that she pulled it off track...it's still broken.