The Clown Car

What do HIV, Hep A, Hep C, and Tuberculosis have in common?  Hopefully, they are all diseases which I do not have.

Today, 9 of the other TAs and I took a ride down to the medical testing facility.  To get a resident permit, one needs to get cleared of a few infectious diseases.  There were also 3 other employees, three drivers, and our escourt from HR.  All told, there were 17 people, and, at first glance, they had one 14 person van.

The HR escourt wound up taking a car with one of the drivers and one of the employees.

At the medical center, the men and the women were split up and entered the buildings in two different areas.  We first sat in a row of chairs and waited to move up in the queue.  Our driver is a rather large, imposing fellow who hails from Egypt.  He relentlessly moved us forward in the queue and at one point seemed to kick someone out of line in front of us.  It is possibly that I missed this person cutting to the front but it seemed as though he was just strong-armed out.

The man behind the window checked my ID and stamped my paperwork.  I walked into another large room with a number of glass, curtain, and queue rail dividers.  I stood in line to get a chest x-ray to check for tuberculosus.  It was here that our driver truly showed his powers.  He was a tireless defender of the no cutting policy.  He would brow-beat his way through the line telling the immigrant workers we were standing with to shape-up the line and get to the back if they had stepped in front.

Eventually, I made it into the x-ray room and, after taking off my shirt, walked to a very modern looking machine and was blasted with high-energy photons.  My paper was stamped and I moved on to the blood work stage.  This involved another queue and more driver-instigated line culling.  When I made it to the front of the line a nice lady called me into a small room and took my papers and the vial with my number on it.  She took a sterile needle out of a drawer, hooked it up to my vial, swabbed my arm, and pricked the inside vein in my left arm.  Blood flowed for a few seconds and it was over.  I held the cotton ball to my arm and went outside to wait with the others who had finished.  After everyone was done, we loaded back into the clown car.