Georgina was waiting at the elevator when Sandy, Mary and I got there. A metallic ‘ding’ announced the arrival of the car. We stepped into the lift, giggling about that day being our first day of work and each showing off the new pink uniforms we were wearing. Mary crossed her fingers and nervously intoned, “Here’s hoping we don’t get fired on our first day!”

In June, right after I graduated from high school, I took a nursing assistant course at a Wausau hospital. The hospital hired me and all the students who successfully finished the classes. For those who needed them, the hospital also provided nearby dormitory rooms for us to rent. Their nursing school had closed a few years earlier so the dorm building was empty.

During the weekend before our first day on duty, we discovered that there was a tunnel corridor between the dorm basement and the hospital basement. Taking this unusual route to arrive at work added heady exhilaration to our already overly stimulated nerves. Sandy said, “I heard there’s a tunnel like this between the hospital and the pediatric ward.”

Having visited the pediatric ward a few days earlier, I commented, “It’s weird that the children’s ward is set apart from the rest of the hospital. I wonder why it’s like that?”

“I know the answer to that!” Georgina excitedly announced. “During the 1950’s that was where this hospital cared for polio patients. Polio was contagious and having those patients separated from other hospital patients prevented it from spreading.”

Stepping out from the dark and rather creepy hospital tunnel, my new friends and I all went our separate ways. My work assignment was the 3 North medical ward. For the next eight hours and much of the following few weeks, time zipped past in a blur. There was so much for me to learn! Was anyone ever greener and more unfamiliar with a hospital’s routine than me? Learning to do routine tasks was easy, but feeling comfortable doing bedside care was sometimes difficult; especially when the patient was a young man my age.

Most of my colleagues were older women and had little in common with me. Slowly, as I became more familiar with my work and they saw I wasn’t lazy, I started to feel accepted. One day while testing diabetic urine in the workroom, one of the older women complained to me about what terrible people some of our coworkers were. To hear her tell it, 3 North was a horrible place to work.

 A sweet, middle-aged nurse charting in the nurse’s station next to the workroom, overheard the vitriol the unhappy worker spewed in my ear. Later, when we were alone, that nurse said to me, “Every place you will work in your lifetime will have problems or imperfections. You need to just look past the irritations and look at the good that can also be found there.”

During my work life I often thought about what that nurse told me. She was right. I never worked where everything was unpleasant, or even for that matter all perfect.

As I headed to my first day of work through the creepy underground tunnel with the three friends from the dorm, we giggled and chattered. We were all newly trained nursing assistants. Little did we know that in starting our jobs, we were stepping into our real lifetime training: learning to be good people. 

As some people age, they feel that the world is changing and becoming unpleasant. The closer we get to retirement age, the more ideal the world of our youth is remembered.  A  well-known elderly person once famously complained, “Youth love luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and love to chatter instead of exercise. They no longer rise when an elder enters the room.”

This often-repeated quote that so thoroughly denounced youth was said by Socrates, an Athenian philosopher who lived 400 years before Jesus Christ was born.

Today, many of the people who were considered irresponsible ‘hippies’ during the 1970’s are probably griping about today’s “good-for-nothing” youth, just as Socrates did. Although Socrates was very intelligent, and the father of Western Theology, I prefer the wisdom of the friendly nurse who told me to always look for the good in all situations. Each generation makes mistakes, but most people are a work in progress.