The Hallway Rap We Cut
Staffing ratios, elevator delays, and why he didn’t make the book.
I tried to keep him. For a while he jogged the perimeter of the draft like someone who mistook the corridor for a stage and the elevator chime for percussion. He had a half-missing badge, a slalom gait, and timing that made even a crash cart sound rehearsed. But each time he entered, the book tilted toward a sketch. Elias’s instrument is the slow fuse; Ricky’s is the snare. I liked the snare. It didn’t belong.
Weather (unsent): Yellow today—faint, off-key.
He would round the corner, sniff the air as if the punchline were atmospheric, and the verse would break against the drywall:
“Yo—Fuck this place, fuck these people,
We don’t save lives, just compliant sheeple!
Clipboard clique with their coded aggression—
Smiles so tight they need antihypertensives!”
The read is accurate. Morale as a vital sign; “coded aggression” as the brochure’s grin translated into clinical pressure. He names something the staff metabolizes but rarely documents. The trouble is the radius. His blast takes out the whole floor when the book prefers wrist-level measurements—specific, timestamped, survivable. In our register, “antihypertensive smiles” could survive as a private shorthand, not a rallying cry.
Sometimes he aimed directly at Elias and, for a beat, turned the witness into a bit:
“Riggy in the hall with his trauma log pad,
Writing down vibes like a narrative dad—”
It’s funny because it’s true: Elias does carry a ledger of what actually happened. But the book needs him as barometer, not punchline. When Ricky performs him, the instrument we’re building—quiet conversions, small precisions—briefly becomes a prop. The laugh lingers; the page smudges.
He had a gift for ratios that felt like weather reports shouted from a loading dock:
“Fifty patients, two techs, zero prep—
Doc’s got a yacht, but I still got debt!
One badge swipe from losin’ my mind—
‘Sincere Documentation’? You lyin’ blind!”
There’s a clean utility to that first line. Staff-to-patient math is how the hour really feels. The yacht/debt couplet vents a pressure that doesn’t route anywhere on paper. And the badge swipe is a good image—one keystroke from losing your place, your shift, your patience. But when he calls “sincere documentation” a lie, the satire goes broad and the audit logic we’ve been assembling gets drowned by the cheer. The book’s critique works best like antiseptic: quiet burn, no foam.
He could even land inside the metaphysics of the record, then press a little too hard:
“Vitals fake, notes tight,
Got a ghost on my list from Thursday night!
Call it post-mortem flow, I’m your chart czar—
These touchpoints faker than a three-star bar!”
“Notes tight” is the trap we keep naming—optimization polished to a shine that hides the omission. “Ghost on my list” hits the after-image the EMR leaves when tasks outlive the patient. But “chart czar” turns the elder of the memory into a cartoon tyrant and steps on our other ghost: the niece who colors the weather. Two ghosts, one hallway; the palette gets muddy.
On the board, where the staff still trust chalk more than flowsheets, his voice almost works. WHEELS: Elev 3 in a mood; detour past Bay 6. Ratios lousy; smiles hypertensive. Badge readers sulking; call before noon. In the record, where sentences accept only sanctioned verbs, that same moment is sanded smooth: hall disruption mitigated; patient flow rerouted via Bay 6 due to elevator delay; staffing escalated through charge; no safety incident. The witness, which is the only reason to write any of this down, sits between those poles: Ricky freestyled about staffing and smiles; three people laughed without sound; one supervisor watched as if grading the joke; throughput improved once we quit waiting for Elevator 3.
That conversion—board to stamp with witness preserved—is the instrument this book plays. Every time I ran Ricky through it, the grit that made him him fell to the cutting-room floor. Keep the verse and we drift toward a sketch show. Convert the verse and we’re left with a memo that pretends it wasn’t sung. Either way, the tone buckles.
I kept trying to smuggle him in as texture. A wink from the elevator bank. A sneaker tapping the crash cart like a landlord asking for rent. But even as cameo, he moves the air too fast. Elias closes a tablet like someone returning a gift; Ricky moonwalks past the moment and invents an audience. One of those gestures belongs to the book’s pulse.
So I cut him. Not because he’s wrong. Because he’s right at a volume the chapters can’t sustain. What remains is influence: the traffic voice folded back into board notes labeled WHEELS, the private shorthand for smiles under pressure, the image of a badge swipe as a precipice. The man himself keeps working in the building. We just don’t follow him in.
We cut things we like to protect the thing we’re making. If you hear him anyway—muffled, behind a door you’re not assigned to—that’s fine. The elevator dings with bureaucratic finality. The hallway swallows the echo. The memory holds the part that fits.