If symptoms persist. . .
AS A citizen and taxpayer, I rejoice whenever I come across an instance of meanness in the disbursement of public money, but as a doctor I often find such meanness irritating. Then I let my irrita- tion give way to indignation, a far more pleasant emotion. To be indignant on someone else's behalf: that is altruism indeed.
I remember reading, some years ago, a book by Vladimir Voinovich called The Ivankiad. It concerned — if I recall it correctly — the efforts of an ordinary Russian called Ivan. to obtain a flat in Moscow. The absurd but necessary nego- tiations would have defeated a Byzantine diplomat: but I cannot remember now whether they were, in the end, successful.
The Ivankiad has given me an idea for a book which I shall call The Theodoriad. Its subject will be my six-month struggle to extract from the hospital administra- tors the money for three ping pong balls, for use in the patients' recreation area.
Quite why this inoffensively minor proposed expenditure should have evoked from the administrators such stiff resistance in the name of economy, when daily we waste thousands, is as mysteri- ous to me as the plot of a post-modernist novel. But every time I contact the administrators about the balls, they mut- ter darkly about the difficulty of 'raising a purchase order' for them. Raising the dead, by comparison, would be easy.
The very phrase is beginning to assume for me a mystical or religious connotation. Whenever I hear an admin- istrator talk of the raising of a purchase order my mind, for some unfathomable reason, turns to Aztec Mexico, and I imagine a priest, dressed in the gorgeous plumage of the quetzal, standing atop an immense pyramid, raising aloft for the edification of the devout masses below the still-palpitating heart, plucked from the breast of a sacrificial prisoner of war with an obsidian knife. In other words, the whole business is shrouded in mys- tery.
In vain have I pointed out that the recreation room already boasts a ping pong table, a net and four bats, so that only balls are further required. The rev- enue implications, I say (resorting for
once to management-speak), of the capi- tal expenditure involved in the purchase of three ping pang balls are virtually nil. No, reply the administrators, the budget is already stretched to breaking point: we have to save £350,000 this year, and the place to start is with ping pang balls. Thus, the table, its net and the bats stand forlornly in the recreation room, like an ultra-modern airport in a sub-Saharan African country, deteriorating while awaiting the development of a tourist industry.
I shouldn't really mind, except that we have just spent £788,000 on modernising the hospital's telephone system. I admit the new phones are splendid, and can perform all kinds of tricks — which is just as well, because there is now only one telephone per ward, whereas before there were two.
Of course, in the administrative offices it's the other way round: where there was only one telephone before, now there are two.
I suppose I shall just have to buy the ping pong balls myself. They will, after all, give me endless fun: not playing, but feeling indignant.
Theodore Dalrymple
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