Adaptation

While I was enjoying an uncommon boring hour in my office, S – a good friend of mine who emigrated to another planet recently – called at my office. (I shouldn’t really say emigrated. If that planet is running the American system, S just got the green card.)

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked – my friend did not appear very well.

“Dizzy, and a bit of nausea,” S put up a bitter smile, “Alas, I just had two back to back meetings with some extraterrestrials, and you know what these creatures are! I must say I couldn’t make the head and tail of what they think – or how they could think in their specific way. It really looks as if they are from another universe that has a different set of rules for logic!”

“But, my friend, this is your job, or what your salary is now paying you for,” I tried to show some empathy, “In a sense you should secretly feel happy if you feel unhappy after those meetings – and you find creatures around are a horrible gang of extra-terrestrials, aliens, vampires, monsters, mollusks, and prematurely discharged subjects from the psychiatric ward – because, in that case, you are still your good old self and not one of them!”

PS. The black humour of our health care system is we do not have enough hospital beds for patients with psychiatric diseases, so much so many of them could only stay in the hospital by taking up administrative posts.