Day in the Life of a Hospital Porter

 

A number of videos have appeared online that are so stylistically distinctive they have quickly formed a new genre. The genre could be called something like "a day in the life of a Silicon Valley employee". A typical one would be about four minutes long and on TikTok. It would be technically well produced and be narrated by the uploader, usually young and female, as she describes her day working for one of the Big Tech giants; Google, Twitter, Meta etc. I say "work", but one thing that strikes me immediately when I watch them is that these people do very little of it. These Silicon Valley office blocks are more like hotels or leisure centres than workplaces. The employee arrives and usually consumes a very posh coffee with various yuppie accessories like toffee cream or aniseed sugar lumps. They then have a meeting for about quarter of an hour followed by lunch at the office's posh restaurant, then a trip to the gym or sauna, followed by another coffee on the roof garden, etc etc; you get the picture. Here's a prime example: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamitzelromero/video/7171572776258604331. Of course this genre has been mercilessly parodied, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azSYS5WDJLQ (I voted Leave, but I still laughed at it). The other day I thought about doing one for hospital porters. Obviously I can't film it myself because I am not an active serving HP anymore, but I can write the script. Here it is:
 
A Day in the Life of a Hospital Porter
featuring Ben Emlyn-Jones- John Radcliffe, Oxford
Hi there! I'm a hospital porter in Oxford and welcome to a day in my life! I get up at 4.30 AM; two alarm clocks means I can't oversleep. I admit I'm a bit tired because I didn't come off duty till 10 PM yesterday and I'm a bit hungry because I was too exhausted to eat dinner when I got home. I walk from my home in Littlemore through the crystal waters of winter rain. It's dark for the whole journey this time of year. Once I clock in I am sent to Delivery Suite to clean a theatre after a pretty gory caesarean section/hysterectomy. I change into theatre scrubs which I remove as soon as I finish because they're covered in blood. After that, thank God!, I'm redeployed to general theatres. There I crouch for forty-five minutes in Theatre 8 holding onto a patient's gangrenous leg while Mr Jefferies and Dr Patel amputate it. After it is wrapped I get to carry the leg to the incinerator for disposal. Then, finally I can have my morning coffee. It's an instant from a forty kilo wholesaler's can can, mixed with Sainsbury's powdered milk and sugar from a bowl filled with dark stains from previous teaspoons. Is that coffee, tea or cocoa? They always add an unexpected extra flavour! Before I can continue work I am called to the boss' office because a sister from CCU reckons I was rude to her last night. My head porter is a college graduate who is younger than my daughter and has never done a day's portering in his life, but who cares? I tell him I can't even remember who this bitch is... Well, I didn't call her that to his face. He believes her and not me of course. I spend the rest of the morning walking from ward to ward, from department to department, doing all kind of jobs. At midday a corpse arrives at the back door. Judging by the way he smells he was dead for quite a while before anybody picked him up. Then finally it's lunchtime! I go to the canteen, trying not to think of the body. The JRH kitchen serves me the best chicken pie and chips you can get outside... a chip shop. Then finally it is 2 PM and I'm due to go off duty, but then... lo and behind! My 2-10 relief never shows up. Is he off sick?... No, he actually booked leave three months ago, but nobody bothered to tell me. "You don't mind staying on, do you, Ben? If you don't our shift will be in the shit big time." "Oh alright, I say." An hour later I wish I'd kept my mouth shut. There's a major incident; train derailment in Banbury. The Horton General is taking the walking wounded and the rest come to us. I shuffle battered, bloodstained, broken moaning and weeping people around for what feels like an eternity. At 9 PM I go to the toilet. When I open the tap to wash my hands I can see faces in the water. These have to be the best fatigue hallucinations I've ever had! At 10 PM I finally stagger to the bus stop. I fall asleep on the bus and the driver wakes me at Cowley Centre, six stops after the one where I was meant to get off. I walk the rest of the way home, treading carefully on my sore feet, and smile as I open my front door and see a pile of envelopes lying there. Bills galore! Gas, electricity, council tax; and they've all gone up. Time for bed now I think. And that's all folks! Hope you liked it. Like, share, subscribe!