Tuesday, November 23, 2010

A couple of months ago I secured the administrator's promise to move my roommate out of the room. This roommate was talking to himself all the time very loudly and making insulting remarks about me which I could not answer because he was talking to himself, not me, but I had to listen to it. This in itself was untenable. But added to this, he was frequently leaving feces on the toilet seat and not cleaning it up, forcing me to choose the two alternatives of either doing him service and cleaning it up myself, or living with it. Neither of these two alternatives was acceptable.

The administrator said that he would move this person out of the room when space became available. I didn't belittle his intelligence by asking him what the reasoning was behind this delay. I had every right to do so, however, and just didn't because it was an automatic argument of unknown discomfort and I wanted to maintain neutrality with this administrator, for what it was worth.

If the administrator lacked the authority to break up an existing other room's two roommates in order to switch my roommate with another person somewhere else, so that I would get a new roommate and so would everyone else of the four of us involved, then, in that case of such lack of authority, there was good reason behind the delay.

I fail to see any other argument for there being reason behind it.

Therefore, the delay implied, from my point of view, that the administrator's latitude to exercise the authority in question lay at cross purposes with his estimation of the merits of my complaint.

There are two components of those merits. One, the unacceptability of my roommate's behavior. And two, my standing as a human being, such as it may happen to be across the broad range of ground on which I stand, from mere animal creature, to paying customer of this nursing home, to person dear or not to anyone at all, or to acknowledgment as first by an organization not to be played with and having a distinctly Italian or Roman composition.

As I have said, I reckon there to be only one explanation for the delay. The fact that I have not proven that there could be no others is a fact that I can play with like the administrator can play with his own latitudes.

I'm afraid from the looks of it the matter comes down on my side of the fence. The administrator, Patrick Baalke, and I are at odds on a non-speaking basis.

I had the roommate removed from the room by virtue of a more receptive audience in the recreation therapy supervisor, Ms. Phyllis Gilmore. I have not spoken of this with Mr. Baalke. I gave him two months to either be freed from his unwillingness to use his latitude by the appearance of a free space, or exercise his latitude. I feel this was quite sufficient.

Mr. Baalke is not perfect. But his imperfection is aligned against my credibility as a person of standing, and that is the new untenable situation. Other administrators have been and will be also not perfect. It is probably the case that this one is better taught a lesson than being discarded. I have not insulted his intelligence, after all, and he will need that to appreciate my dissatisfaction with his exercise of power.