Chapter Five: Leaving Hillside - The Revenge of Fred, the Wonder Pigeon​​​

 

     After Jack's birth, I again took eight weeks off to re-familiarize myself with all the parenting tasks my wife had taken it upon herself to accomplish. Seeking to give Alma some rest during this period, I took over the feeding, dressing, bathing, diaper changing, and housecleaning, all with varying degrees of success. I wouldn’t realize until two years later this time was more than a respite for Alma – this was my dress rehearsal.

 

     After my parental leave ended, I returned to Hillside Hospital, more than somewhat depressed. To say I was reluctant was putting things mildly. My eight weeks home with the kids had intensified a feeling I had begun to experience even before Jack was born - beyond salary, my job at Hillside had come to feel increasingly irrelevant. If that realization wasn’t troubling enough, I had also come to a second and even more troubling revelation - I was employed by morons.

 

     Helping to alleviate my discontent was a sharp increase in a moonlighting business I once viewed as merely a sideline. Benefitting from my old school contacts at Case Western Reserve, I took advantage of my website training and began developing online sites for several start-up businesses in the Greater Cleveland area. The jobs were small initially, but they allowed me to work from home. Over time, they became an increasingly important factor in our modest family income.

 

     Moonlighting aside, I never seriously thought of leaving my job at Hillside. My work at the hospital was familiar, and I had developed a reasonably decent reputation for competence. In my hubris, I believed I could do the job with my eyes shut. That assurance ended after my self-induced marketing crisis, a turning point known by my co-workers as the great pigeon logo incident.

 

     Logo changes are a rarity in healthcare, as patients justifiably prefer their providers to possess a reasonable degree of stability. As with many things, my employer was an exception.

 

     Striving to broaden its customer base, Hillside Hospital had changed logos six times in my previous three years of employment. One of the latest revisions, the event that solidified my decision to leave the organization, debuted a few months after Jack was born at an offsite retreat attended by the Hillside marketing department.

 

     The new logo was, to be fair, memorable. Projected on a huge screen in the offsite conference room, it resembled nothing less than a bird rising from my dog’s food bowl. The observation seemed harmless, but I then foolishly chose to share it with a co-worker.

 

     While not my brightest moment, that slip alone would likely have proved innocuous, a meaningless joke in the middle of an otherwise dull meeting. That would have been true if I hadn’t followed it with a nickname.

 

     In a college lecture illustrating the importance of impact marketing, a professor told us even the best ideas tend to fade over time. To reverse that effect, the same professor added, you need to give your concept a name. It was an admonition I should have remembered before I launched “Fred the Wonder Pigeon” into Hillside lore.

In a remarkable testament to word-of-mouth advertising, my logo moniker spread beyond marketing in a matter of days, soon to be on the lips of seemingly every physician, nurse, and custodial worker employed at Hillside Hospital.

 

     Seemingly buoyed by the laughter, Fred flew for four months before being replaced by a less-mocked logo, one that looked suspiciously like the design that proceeded him, albeit with a slightly different font.

As a mere website manager, the new logo would typically have had little impact on my day-to-day activities beyond some minor design changes. Unfortunately, my role in Fred’s birth became known almost as rapidly as the name itself.

 

     I never figured out who dropped the dime on Fred and me, but the inside story of Fred, the Wonder Pigeon, made its way back to Tommy Tomaselli,  Hillside’s Vice President of Marketing and the man who green-lit the ill-fated logo in the first place,

 

     Tommy called me to his office almost immediately. Standing before his desk awaiting my fate, I noticed once again Tommy’s remarkable resemblance to Mr. Rodgers, though Mr. R. could never match the disturbingly psychotic glint in Tommy’s ice-blue eyes.

​

     As was often the case with senior-level managers, Tommy possessed a notably poor sense of humor. After confirming the rumors were true, my irate boss proceeded right to the point.

​

     “The way I see it, you managed to turn three months of work by the Marketing Department, your department I might add, into a hospital-wide joke.”

​

    “I’m sorry, sir. I thought dogs and birds – everybody likes those, right?”

​

     While doing nothing to improve his sense of humor, I managed to exit Tommy’s office with my job still intact. That being said, I knew my good fortune was temporary. My next performance review wasn’t for another ten months, but I needed a fallback. Luckily for me, Alma beat me to it.

​

     Figuring she had enough to worry about just taking care of our children, I had given Alma only the Reader’s Digest version of the logo fiasco. Now two years old, Jack had mastered walking and talking – the opportunities for annoying his sister multiplying exponentially.

​

     When Alma approached me after Jack and Emily went to bed, I figured it was something about the kids. I was right, just not in the way I thought.

​

     “Laura called me today. She made an offer I wanted to run past you.”

​

     Laura Tester, an unfortunate name for an educator, was a friend of Alma’s from back in their college days. Laura and Alma had kept in touch after graduation, the two occasionally going out for lunch when I could watch the kids. Now the principal at the Cranberg Institute for Children with Autism and Special Needs, Laura had once tried to recruit Alma as a teacher. With our kids and Alma’s statistical background, the fit had never seemed quite right. This time was different.

​

     “Laura’s school teamed up with several other autism centers in a giant research study. Related to that and some other projects they have going, Cranberg is recruiting for a Director of Research and Analytics. I wouldn’t be teaching, but Laura thought I would be perfect for the job.”

​

     I knew a lifeline when I saw one. I also knew there was more than Alma had said thus far.

​

     “You always talked about going back to work someday. This position would better fit your skillset, not to mention the higher salary. We could put more away for the kids’ college funds.”

 

     “We could, but…” and here she hesitated, “I think one of us should stay home with the kids.”

I could see where this was headed, and I couldn’t have loved her more.

 

     “I’ll do it.”

 

     She continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “It means cooking, cleaning, breaking up fights, attending doctor’s visits, along with a million other things besides. Are you sure you can manage all that?  The last time I let you do the laundry, you turned my favorite shirt pink.”

​

     “But you still wear it.”

​

     “I wear it to do gardening and only when there’s no one else outside.”

​

     “I messed up one shirt. Name anything else on your list I got wrong.”

​

     “How about the time you fed the kids cupcakes for breakfast?”

​

     “In fairness, I thought they were muffins.”

​

     “And should I even bring up the famous nighttime changing incident?”

​

     I didn’t have to ask what incident she was referring to. When Emily was only six months old, I volunteered, in a late-night haze, to change my daughter’s diaper. In my stupor, I removed the offending garment and placed it in the proper receptacle. Unfortunately, I never took the next step - the one that involved placing a brand-new diaper on my crying baby girl. Alma discovered the results when she got up the next morning.

​

     “That was messy, but do you want this job or not?  I swear I won’t let you or the kids down.”

​​

     Previously pacing, Alma stopped and told me her real concern. “I need to know why you would do this - no jokes, no snark, just the truth. This is not a part-time job, and I need to know why you’re willing to give up your position, a job you’ve held for years, to stay home and take care of your kids. I need to know the real reason, or I’ll call Laura and tell her I’m turning the position down.”

​

     I had things to say; I just didn’t know how to say them. I started slowly, but once I began, I wasn’t sure I would ever stop.

​

     “I started my position at Hillside before we got married, and I was proud of the work I did. I was good at my job, and I was lucky enough to move up quickly.

​

     “Once the kids were born - all that started to change. I can’t say what triggered the shift, but the website and the people I worked with began to seem less and less important.  Now every time I walk out our door in the mornings, I feel like I’m leaving a part of myself behind.

​

     “I know I’m being melodramatic, but I almost feel like I’m losing a piece of my soul. These last several months, I find myself at work wondering what the hell I’m really doing at Hillside. Whether that’s due to the people I work with or the position itself, I’m not sure which.

​

     “Do you want to know what worries me the most?  Throughout all this, I’m still very good at what I do - that’s a confession, by the way, not conceit. What does it say about me that I’m still good at a job part of me despises?  I look at Tommy Tomaselli, the obnoxious little troll that he is, and I wonder – is this how he got started?  Is Tommy what I’m becoming?”

​

     I realized now I was the one pacing, as I suddenly understood just how important this opportunity was to me. I ended with a plea.

​

     “Please let me have this chance.”          

​

     Alma looked like she was seeing me for the first time. As I was not usually prone to self-reflection, maybe she really was. Leaning over to kiss me on the cheek, she said,   

​

     “Your soul was one of the main reasons I married you. We can’t have you losing that, can we?”

​

     Alma then took out her phone. Calling her friend Laura, she formally declared her interest in the Cranberg position. The decision made, Alma and I sat down to review our finances. With the proposed salary from Alma’s new position added to what I was earning in my at-home website jobs, we came out slightly ahead of the game. That brought us to telling the kids, who took the change considerably better than I expected.

​

     In Jack’s case, his good mood revolved around food. Assuming I had no cooking skills, Jack was sure my ascendency would mean a constant stream of take-out food. When told he was mistaken, he accepted the change somewhat grudgingly, mollified only when I assured him I could cook his favorite spaghetti.

​

     Emily also had concerns, though hers were non-food related. My daughter wanted to make sure that I would remember; a) her April birthday and b) the start of kindergarten classes in late August. When assured I would forget neither, Emily accepted my ascension to home caregiver with a surprising degree of equanimity.   

 

     The formal offer from the Cranberg administration arrived later that week. As it was already late November, the school agreed to delay Alma’s start date until January of the following year. That delay allowed me five weeks' notice at my job, along with an extra week of Alma training at the end.

 

     The five weeks also enabled me to train my replacement, a mid-level manager named Thomas Craisten, who transferred from internal marketing. Tom had experienced his own job crisis two years earlier with an unfortunate misspelling on a flyer advertising the joint patient/staff Christmas party. Promising “Pictures with Satan,” the poster was taken down after just one day. Unfortunately for Tom, however, it was still hard not to notice the unusual nature of many of that year’s partygoers.    

 

     My last official day at Hillside was also the date of this year’s holiday party, held in the atrium serving as a thoroughfare between Hillside’s two largest patient care buildings. I debated whether I should go. After several awkward well-wishes from my staff, I had no interest in receiving the same from what would be a much larger group of people. Eventually, the lure of free food won out, and I walked to the atrium for the last hour of the hospital-wide gathering.

 

     While planned with the best of intentions, patient needs never seem to cooperate with the intent of Hillside parties. The Atrium being an open area, the canned holiday music was frequently interrupted by overhead pages requesting a physician’s presence at this or that medical emergency. At times, the juxtaposition could be amusing. The previous year, lyrics heralding “the birth of our King” were followed immediately by, “Dr. Tepher, please call the delivery room.”

 

    Unfortunately, there were no follow-up occurrences at this year’s event. I stayed the required hour, accepted a few more well-wishes, and left as quickly as I could. Always a good thing, home never seemed so welcome as it did today.