« Sam's Story: Week 11 |Main| Book Review: When You Are Engulfed in Flames »
Culture shows up in the weirdest places April 17, 2004
Rather strict California licensing requirements prevent me from actually calling myself a psychologist, but if they didn't, I would. One of the things that led me into Industrial/Organizational Psychology was an interest in finding out why people behave as they do when put into organizations or even loosely structured situations. How do people learn what's appropriate? How does what's appropriate become what's appropriate? Through what mechanisms is information disseminated to people in an organization or other group? What causes people to leave organizations or other social groups?
Thanks to 7 years of overeducation and mountains of crippling debt, I had an idea of how to answer those questions this week when I observed the behavior of people in St. Francis Hospital's Intensive Care Waiting Room. This was the room where family and friends of patients in the ICU were able to pass the time between visiting hours (the only kind of hours I know of that only lasted 30 minutes each). At only a few hundred square feet, the room was small and its perimeter was lined with nearly soft couches, which were colored with nearly calming hues of lavender and seafoam green. A small television perched near the ceiling in one corner, but all I remember about it was that it seemed perpetually tuned to History Channel movies about WWII submarine crews. Behind the reception desk hung a white board divided into a sloppy grid, each square of which contained the phone number and status ("here" or "home", etc.) of each patient's family.
But it wasn't the things in the waiting room that really interested me. The people did. When a new visitor, such as myself, first arrived, we quickly learned the system of rules and mores that had, at some point, developed. I learned, for example, that if the volunteer staffing the reception desk is out, the next nearest person should answer a ringing phone with "ICU waiting room," find out what family the caller is trying to reach, and announce that family's name in a LOUD, clear voice and wait for someone to answer. If no one answers, reply to the caller with "Sorry, nobody is answering," and end the call. If someone does answer, you transferred the call to one of the other stations scattered throughout the room and told the family where to pick it up. It was amazing to see people pick all of this up and jump into the role after watching someone else do it a couple of times.
I also learned that one's place on a particular couch could be held by almost any item, such as a pillow, a book, or a coat. I saw a few people encroach on others' territory a few times, and they were quickly but silently put straight when the spot's prior owner returned from the restroom or a visit to the ICU unit. It's amazing how strong a message you can send by simply sitting right next to someone, even though there are other seats available.
Besides roles and turf wars, through, the people in the ICU Waiting Room were interested in each other. It was considered rude to ask about someone's misfortune directly, but you could gather intelligence through intermediaries and share it with anyone else who asked. I learned which family had an 18-year old badly hurt in a car crash, which one had a father with clogged heart valves, and which fiance had been living in the waiting room for twelve weeks and surviving on nothing but Hershey's chocolate bars and cheese puffs. And I suppose that a few people circuitously learned about my dad's condition as well.
The really, really cool thing, though, was how this little waiting room society reacted when someone abandoned it. We were happy and we cheered. A couple of times when I happened to be there people got phone calls saying that their loved one had improved to the point that the ministrations of the ICU staff were no longer necessary and they could "move up" to a normal hospital room. That was good news that everyone was glad to overhear. We even clapped a few times.
You know, people are all right. Even the ones who glare at you for sitting too close to the newspaper that marks the edge of their seafoam green and lavender territory.
Comments (0) |
Permalink | 
File under:
I/O Psychology
