On her Saturday shift, Anne looked unusually ecstatic. This is the same Anne who usually has a frown on her face and is looking for reasons to tear the medical students and residents apart. But today, she couldn’t wipe the smile off her face.
When asked why, she replied in a semi-comatose phase of uncontrollable joy: “Oh I just came back from a trip to the desert and you know just happened to stumble into the Cave of Wonders. And I found this.” She showed her colleagues an ancient looking golden pager with impressive carvings. “This is just what I needed to make my life on the wards more tolerable. Otherwise I was just about to quit.”
Anne then proceeded to give her circle of RNs a little demonstration.
“Here, you actually just press this button and he appears out of thin air, ready at a moment’s notice! No finding and then dialing a pager number, no dealing with guilt of midnight paging and certainly no angry residents talking back to you! Life is just perfect!”
She then had a brief uncontrollable fit of semi-evil laughter before pressing the button. Within the blink of an eye, the resident appeared. But it was barely an amusing scene: the resident was snoring loudly and sleeping while floating in mid air.
One of her colleagues asked: “So what can he do?”
“He can do almost anything you can imagine! Signing orders forgotten by the day team at 2 AM? Check. Ordering more Haldol for delirious elderly patients? Check. Want to ‘make MD aware’ about a midnight blood glucose above 200 for which you aren’t going to give insulin anyway? Check. Even cleans up C. diff diarrhea!”
Anne then demonstrated a command to the resident genie.
“Hi, is this the medicine resident? You are covering overnight right?”
The genie resident immediately snuck back into the pager and disappeared.
Embarrassed, Anne explained to everyone, “Residents still tend to ignore the first page or two. Even the magical ones. Well that’s it for today. I am going to have to put it away for now.”
“Is that because you have limited wishes? You know the three wish limit?” someone asked naturally.
“Oh no. My first wish was for infinite pages.”
With that said, Anne winked at the crowd and then proceeded to chart some more. She worked happily ever after.
