This guy

I work in community health. Which means that there are a lot of people with a lot of problems and not a lot of money coming in for mental and physical health care, usually the acute kind.  Some folks are more acute than others.  My first week at this gig, I was a bit overwhelmed by the pace of the work and the sheer magnitude of the illness of the patients.  As my office is the first you pass once you get past the lobby, a lot of them would pop their heads in or look in as they passed to mutter alternately bizarre, hilarious, and threatening things.  One gentleman in particular made a point of stopping as he passed, raising his hand high in the air as if to wave to someone across the street though my door is a few small feet from where I sit, pause for a few moments with a somewhat vacant smile while he marshaled his resources, and then let fly with a hearty, "Hi!"  I blinked a few times, wondering if more was coming, but no, he stood frozen with the hand in the air and the toothless grin.  I took the cautious route. "Er, hello?"  Gratified, he walked away with an even wider grin.  Hmm. Well, that was an awkward encounter but painless I guess if not distracting. Oh well. Back to work.

He came back the next day. He stayed all day this time, about 6 hours, and every time he walked past my door he went through the same ritual: Pause. Smile. Raise hand and wave. "Hi!" Wait for response. Shamble off. He did it no matter how busy I looked, how bored I looked, if I was on the phone or talking with a staff member. If my door was open, the ritual occurred. I didn't know him, he wasn't my patient, I didn't know what kind of cognitive delays he might be living with, but after 4 repetitions in the same day it was getting annoying.  What the fuck dude, I'm working.

Days passed. Turns out he comes back to spend long days at the clinic about 3 or 4 days a week.  He's always hanging around. I started keeping my door closed more often so that I wouldn't have to deal with the distraction.  Every time we had what I refer to now as the wazzup interaction, I got a little more aggravated by the break in my flow. I mean, he never wanted to talk about anything, he just seemed to enjoy interrupting me interminably. WHAT DO YOU WANT RANDOM MAN AT MY PLACE OF WORK?? YOU'RE DRIVING ME MAD!

And then I had A Moment. My door was closed, and I had just had a rough few clients in a row.  I was in the kind of mood that would sour milk.  I noticed his legs pass by my window without stopping, which usually filled me with a bit of relief. But this time, I had that vague angsty feeling of missing something.  Shit. Wait.  Where the merry hell was my effer-fucking-vescent smile and greeting??  I don't get a lot of people smiling at me in my work day, and I was wasting one I could really depend on.  I opened my door and kept it open from there on out unless I was on the phone.  I realized that I was becoming dangerously close to aggregating that kind of jaded bitterness that you see in some community health workers.  Those ones who don't seem to actually like people. Well fuck that. I refuse to go down like that. I got into this biz directly because I liked interacting with people, thrive on it in fact, and so just why was a cheerful salutation getting my panties all bunched up my ass. Good question. So I proceeded with  a proctological panty extraction procedure and completed a high attitudinal enema. Done.

Now, I look forward to my daily dose of cheerful, no strings attached wazzup as much as I do my morning coffee.  He never wants more than a second of my time, and it's inexplicable but every time we wazzup I feel a bit better about the universe in general.  And when you work with the kind of population and burned out staffers I do, that's gold bankable right there.