You Might Live in a Hospital If – You know your best friend’s name because it’s on his uniform.

Joe works in Environmental Services at CHoP. He was a boxer for nine years and I would guess he was pretty good. He likes the Colts and the Cowboys, “straight down the middle.” I don’t understand it, but I respect it. He hates the Eagles, which is tough to do when you live in Phila – and enough to catapult you to the top of my list any day. We talk about football and PlayStation. He waited in line for three days this week to get PS3. He was the sixteenth person to get a PS3 at the store where he waited. The store only had twenty units. The kid who got unit number six was robbed at gunpoint in the parking lot. Joe and his cousins went out the side door. His biggest complaints were that he could only get one game (they started selling games three days before consoles, so now 800 people have games for a console they couldn’t get because they didn’t sleep outside for three days) and the tax on the console was $56. I told him he should have gone to Delaware where there is no sales tax. He told me his sister lives in Delaware and the store near her was giving away t-shirts. Joe and I agreed we would not wear those t-shirts. That’s like holding up a sign displaying the balance in your checking account as you walk into an ATM vestibule. I asked him if the t-shirt said, “I got a PS3 and didn’t get jacked in the parking lot.” Joe thought that was funny.

He also thought it was funny that I went to the Giants game last weekend in the freezing rain. He thought it was funny when the guy on the Bears ran a missed field goal back 108 yards. He still thinks it’s funny that Peyton is way better than Eli. He opined that, “every family has a frick-up in it.” Joe and I still have some differences to work out.

But Joe is very friendly. The Environmental Services group out numbers most other departments in the hospital and for the most part they don’t say much. When Joe rolls in I am afraid he is going to get in trouble for spending too much time in our room.

Erin says the Environmental Services guy who comes on weekdays is Moses. But her best friend is Walt: He gives us food vouchers for the cafeteria, checks in on Erin on a regular basis, and calls me Mr. Brown even though I have asked him not to. I passed him in a completely different part of the hospital last week, as he was leaving to go home, and he still took the time to stop me and ask how I was doing. Good people.