Beep beep

Anyone who has taken call can appreciate this story, and even if you have not, hopefully you'll still find it funny.

So when any medical resident takes overnight call in the hospital, usually you arrive early one morning, work all day, stay up working all night, then work half the next day, and finally get to go home sometime around lunch on the second day. This is a fact of life with call and residency in general. The problem is that quite a bit of time without much rest has occurred in the interim between arrival and departure. And a frequent consequence of this is the inability to find one's car because of not remembering where it was parked the 30 hours or so earlier when you arrived at the hospital.

I, like many residents, have had this happen, with all of the thoughts of 'Argh! Where did I park my car? I usually park here, but did I park somewhere different yesterday?' When you're tired and hungry and just want to go home, you can't believe the lengths you will go to in order to find your car. That brings me to my story.

The other day I happened to be going to my car around lunch for a meeting I had to go to, and as I walked through the parking garage, I saw three residents running up and down one of the middle ramps in the garage pressing the lock button on their car remotes to make the horn beep to help find their car. The problem was, with three car horns beeping intermittently, they were all getting confused on which beep was their car. Yet they kept running up and down past each other without a word and kept pressing the car remote buttons. It was like a comedic symphony, and I stood and watched for a while. I laughed and yet my heart broke for them at the same time.

Then the next day Janelle called me frantically, saying, "I don't know what to do, I can't find the car! I've been to all my usual spots, and it's not there. Can you come and drive me around the parking garage to find the car? I'm so tired, and I had such a terrible call night, and I just want to go home!" The desperation in her voice was so unbearable, so I begged off from what I was doing and went to go help my beleaguered wife. I only made it a few steps when she called back, relieved, saying she had found the car. It turns out she was a little annoyed that we had switched cars the day before. You see, she was used to pushing the car remote button to locate the car by the beep just on occasions like this, and my car, well, it doesn't beep with the remote.