Rules Guy

“It’s on airplane mode.  It’s the same as if I was sitting here using a calculator.  A calculator won’t haywire medical electronics.”  

Even before my snippy little retort had hit the back of my throat, I knew it was hopelessly impotent.  The smug amusement exuding from the unctuous smirk of the receptionist told me immediately that my clumsy riposte (and obvious lie) had been lobbed right into the sweet spot of a Rules Guy, a niggling bureaucrat for whom exacting enforcement of meaningless controls is a line of pure uncut smack.  The unadulterated ecstasy a Rules Guy experiences catching a perpetrator in mid-violation of a regulation within his jurisdiction can be described as nothing short of religious in nature.  The only higher high a Rules Guy can know is the ultra-orgasmic gratification of watching his quarry try to helplessly talk their way out of whatever they got caught doing; it’s the same blissful dominance a spider feels watching a housefly waste its last bit of energy winding itself tighter and tighter as it struggles to free itself.  

“I’m sorry, but the sign doesn’t say ‘No cell phones in the waiting room unless they’re on airplane mode.’  So, I’m going to have to ask you to please turn it off or take it outside.”

Prick.  I’ve had to deal with Rules Guys like this all my life and have somehow never built up an immune system sufficient to shield my psyche from their crap.  One would think that somewhere along life’s path, my brain could have tuned out their constant barrage of petty harassments and exasperations, like how after a while the residents of apartments abutting an L-Train track can condition themselves to not even hear the mechanical shrieking and clattering shaking their walls every ten minutes.  But, for me, it’s just never happened.  To me, Rules Guys are like mosquitos and tsetse flies buzzing around my ears over and over and over and no matter how many times I swat them away, they just keep coming back.  I just can’t shake them.  I figure my real problem is the hopeless optimism that I can’t force myself to jettison that each time I get a couple days respite maybe, just maybe, I’ve done away with them for good this time or that maybe somehow society as a whole has made the collective decision to excise Rules Guys completely; it always makes it just that much worse when the little bastards reappear and their infuriating buzzing starts all over again.  

Over the years, I’ve developed a simple taxonomy of Rules Guys, which has served me relatively well; it's a sort of field guide to assholedom.  In the course of my ongoing (albeit unwilling) research, I have found that I can fit 99.9999% of Rules Guys into one of three distinct species.

The first and most common variety (and by far the most tolerable) is the Abused Mutt. He’s the guy who finds himself in an organization layered countless levels below some super-special medical prima donna who will be Goddamned if he is going to be kept waiting by a jackass patient who just has to finish up his text before going back to the examination room and, by golly, at some point, it turns out the super-special medical prima donna is kept waiting by some jackass patient who figures he just has to clarify exactly how hard he was LOL before heading back to the examination room.  

So, the Hospital’s Chief Executive gets piss in his ear about cell phones in the waiting room and turns around and gives it to the Chief of Hospital Operations and off it goes traveling down the chain of command from Committee Chair to Deputy Committee Chair to Assistant Deputy Committee Chair to Senior Physician to Associate Physician to Visiting Physician to Head Nurse and so on and so forth until it hits some poor bastard, who now has to live under a Sword of Damocles and can kiss his career in medical administrative support goodbye if ever as much as a glimpse of a cell phone is spotted in the waiting room.   I can sometimes sympathize with this species of Rules Guy and even kinda appreciate their struggle… at least to some small degree.  For the Abused Mutt, life is just a never-ending series of exercising muscle memory while internally reciting the Nuremberg Defense writ infinitesimal; he’s just following orders and doesn’t want to enforce this crap any more than I want to obey it.

Now, the second genus of Rules Guys (the one to really watch out for and avoid whenever humanly possible) is the Petty Authoritarian.  Like the Abused Mutt, he’s a cog in a machine layered twenty levels down some organizational pyramid who gets consistently mistreated and casually abused.  However, instead of buckling under, he figures it a good bit of fun to get the gears spinning on the next turn of the vicious cycle.  As soon as he acquires the barest scintilla of power, his life’s mission becomes to identify the poor schmuck in the organization’s twenty-first layer to pay forward all the abuse that’s been shoved his way.  

This is the Rules Guy who stews in silent rage for getting crapped on over scanning insurance cards double-sided-left-justified instead of single-sided-center-justified and translates his fury into a unforgiving enforcement regime against cell phones in the waiting room.  While totally contemptable and thoroughly despicable, I kind of understand the Petty Authoritarian and on some level admire his willingness to abuse his minimal authority to indulge his wraith against a world that won’t stop tormenting him.  I'm actually pretty impressed that a piddling bureaucrat could come to regard himself as a Nietzschean uber-mensch trying his damnedest to force his environment to assauge his hurt feelings through the rigorous prosecution of some meaningless rule.  More than that though, I can’t help but feel a swell of pity for him, an administrative Mussolini with a squirt gun possessing an oversized self-regard, grandiose instincts, and a violent will to power, but too impotent to effectuate any of the real sadism that his id so voraciously craves.

That leaves the third and final variety of Rules Guy, the True Believer.  He’s the guy who really, really understands that the No Cell Phone Rule is there for a darned good reason and Goddamnit he’s going to make sure that no cell phone ever appears in his waiting room…. No way…. Not on his watch.  True Believers lack the ability to perceive moral or regulatory nuance even in the simplest binary paradigm of right or wrong.  Nope, not only are these poor sods unable to see the world in shades of grey, they can't even see it in black and white. It's just white and white and anything that isn’t white… well, that just can’t be.  Like the mother on the local news wailing that her methed-out, skinhead son who just filleted the neighbors really is just the sweetest kid you could imagine, True Believers’ sincerity is simultaneously touchingly endearing and absolutely sickening.   The stuff they believe in is all crap, but I guess I admire that at least they believe in something.  

The True Believer is becoming more and more rare, a final glint of blind hope and unshakable faith in a world designed to refute and stomp out authenticity in all its forms. Their numbers correlate inversely with the justifiably inflated cynicism of today's society and its general intolerance of officialdom.   Five hundred years ago, if the village deacon proclaimed that his congregation had to smash rhubarb bulbs into their eyes while dancing naked and sacrificing the family goat under the full moon…. Well, a rule’s a rule and an endless line of True Believers would stretch out the chapel door and around the village commons bare-assed and laboring to keep the goats from getting at the rhubarb.  Nowadays, twenty years after the President got caught engaging in a little extramarital cigar play, an authority figure could inform a crowd that they are actively engulfed in flames and ninety-nine out of hundred of them would be trying to work through what con they’re being fed.  It’s somewhat of an unfortunate reality that most everyone who comes off as a True Believer nowadays is really just an exceptional faker; for every actual True Believer, there’s a Yankee Stadium full of Rules Guys who have just developed the self-discipline and lack of principle to never ever break character.  For these fakers, if Comrade Beria says that it won’t rain on Sunday, then by God come Sunday, they’ll pull out their sunshirts and head to Gorky Park to picnic in ankle deep puddles and torrential downpours declaring it the most beautiful Sunday that has ever been.

So back to me and the age-old question: Fight or Flight?  

My assessment of this receptionist was trending towards Type II Rules Guy (Petty Authoritarian), probably some jerk who just got an earful from the Interim Assistant Executive Deputy Team Co-Lead about how sneakers really aren’t appropriate attire for a “front office position” and needed to balance the existential scales by throwing me into his gunsights as the most baggable game for a quick exercise of administrative machismo and dick-swinging.  Did I care enough about buckling under and letting this prissy little snot get the best of me or would it be worth it to try to put a point up on the board against the Rules Guys of the world?  

The most obvious and rational option was just to put the phone away and let him have his little victory. He seemed to need it and… Hell, maybe I could pull off my retreat in a way that made me look menschy or at least make him look like a jackass. 

A less reasonable, but more enticing option was to just go passive aggressive and pull the deaf-mute trick, silently continuing my texting over his escalating protests.  Would he actually have the huevos to call security over such a stupid infraction?   I guess if he did, I could put it away when the hospital cops showed; at least that way I would have demonstrated that the surrender of my autonomy was in the face of the threat of physical compulsion, not just because some Rules Guy made a demand.

My third and most immediately appealing option was just to pull out the stops and go pure non compos mentis.  Maybe a frenzied cocktail of profanity, rank-pulling, name-dropping, and First Amendment platitudes could force him down.  Sometime last year, my older son had shown me this amazing video showing two dung beetles literally fighting to the death over a piece of bear turd; in the end, the outcome came down to the simple fact that the winner cared more about the piece of crap than the other one did.  That could be me.  I didn’t have much compunction about making a scene and was pretty sure that I could escalate this trivial little pissing match to a place that he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) go.  On the other hand, was an escalation worth the risk of possibly being the leading man in a Public Freakout viral video surreptitiously recorded by one of the waiting room’s other denizens (who, not for nothing, would have been breaking the No-Cell-Phone Rule just as much as I was)?

Yeah, of course, it was.

I narrowed my eyes and drew a breath, steeling myself to actually go through with it. This was it. I was bringing the epic crazy in a way the Rules Guys would never forget. Just as I stepped to the edge of irrevocably committing to the most banally insane impulse of my life, my courage faltered.  I just couldn't do it. There was just something about the delivery of the receptionist’s rebuke that had instilled in me an insurmountable fear. Maybe, just maybe, this was one of the rarest of the rare Rules Guys, the one in a million that transcends classification, the bureaucratic anomaly playing by his own rules outside of the boundaries of known administrative morality.  

 It may have been the omission of a perfunctory “Sir” in his demand. "Sir" is the standard issue sidearm of all Rules Guys, the patina of plausible deniability providing an impenetrable shield for even the most unreasonable of demands.   A Rules Guy can get away with ordering someone to lick his butt-cheeks clean as long as he remembers to include the “Sir” somewhere in the request.  The receptionist's avoidance of the term seemed to be effected with conscious intent, evidencing that he very well may be playing outside the known framework of bureaucratic morality altogether and that protecting himself from organizational consequence meant nothing to him.   

It may also have been the odd incongruence of the pale-green scrubs he wore in order to perform the duties of a receptionist.   This guy job description was purely administrative – endlessly scheduling appointments, throwing phone calls to indefinite hold, faxing and re-faxing insurance forms into procedural vortexes, forwarding panicked messages from the answering service that “No, I most certainly can NOT wait until this afternoon for Dr. Johnson to re-up my Adderall prescription!”  His scrubs were just as much a costume as the cowgirl get-up worn by the hostess at the Texas BBQ House and there was just as much chance of him ever performing medical services as there was of her breaking broncos or wrangling strays.   So, why did he wear them?  Did they force him to?  Was it a sanitary thing?  Was it just another rule that had spilt down on him from on high? 

Wait!  Good lord!  Was he wearing them by choice?  Did he buy them himself and bring them from home?   Why! 

It was all coming together.  Combined with the casual hostility implied in his extra little jibe about how the sign didn’t exclude airplane mode raised a screeching alarm in my head that this very well may be a black swan existing outside the norms or logic of any ordinary Rules Guy rationality.  I just sat there slack-jawed, not knowing which way to go. When seasoned outdoorsmen cross paths with grizzly bears or mountain lions or timber rattlers, they don’t panic; they know predator behavior and can act calmly and confidently in the manner most likely to maximize their chance of survival.  But if one of them were to ascend a ridge to find a four-headed mountain troll…. Well, that would be a different matter.  There’s just no playbook for that.  In that case, panic is both natural and rational.

            “You got it, Chachi. Not a problem.”  

            I slunk the phone in my coat pocket, head down and eyes to the ground like a wayward schoolboy being scolded by the Headmistress.  I just sat there staring at a display of tri-fold HPV pamphlets, my mind spinning franticly in a toxic stew of indignation and vengeance and furiously devising how to get the gears spinning on my turn of the vicious cycle.