Vacuum Cleaning Insight
In the Lowell Cole story I wrote briefly about my one year stint vacuuming carpets at the IDS Center in Minneapolis after getting my GED and while in my first year of "college." As I was reflecting on this I realized that adding some additional detail about my vacuuming days could be of interest.
A brief recap: thanks to Audrey at the TCOIC and to my willingness to say Hell No to a potential welding career, I took and passed the GED and enrolled in Metropolitan Community College in downtown Minneapolis. Back in the early '70s the school was a one building affair that catered to what appeared to be two demographics: young lost, mixed up, wayward kids struggling to find a path in life (your's truly) and a few older adults who, though older, were doing essentially the same thing as the kids.
It was not Yale.
It was laid back, light weight, and devoid of intense academic rigor. It was, in other words, perfect for someone like me who - despite Audrey's encouragement - had no idea what an adverb, adjective, noun, or clause was, and who could not add fractions. Gentle, accepting, and patient. Just what I needed.
Plus the kids (and I) often hung out just outside the building or across the street in Loring Park smoking cigarettes and pot. Nice and familiar.
I lived in uptown Minneapolis, about 10 blocks from the cockroach infested apartment where I previously dwelled with my alcoholic, suicidal mother and my alcoholic, violent "step-father." At 7:30 each morning, I took the bus to school, which was on the edge of downtown. After classes, I would either take the bus or walk to the IDS center to vacuum for 8 hours from - 5:30 PM to 1:30 AM - then take the bus home to my apartment.
Rinse and repeat, Monday through Friday, for the next year while I saved as much money as I could to buy a car (the Vega that I totaled). I hated taking the bus for a thousand reasons, the most pressing being the brutal fact that there wasn't a woman in the world I could ask out and then not be able to pick her up in a car. The thought of saying "Can you take a bus and meet me" made my blood run cold. Plus, I'd grown up taking the bus as a kid, and now taking the bus was a symbol of everything I was desperate to escape - with an insane level of determination.
The only thing I ever liked about the bus as a teenager was hopping them. "Hopping the bus" was the phrase that, in my teenage era, referred to the act of walking up behind a bus as it was pulled over to load or discharge its human cargo, and while at a standstill, hopping onto the back by grabbing the edges of the metal frame that held the ubiquitous advertisements on the back of every bus, planting the front of one's feet on the bumper edge, ducking one's head down to avoid detection by the driver in their rear view mirror, and then hopping off upon reaching one's destination.
I cannot believe how stupid and reckless I was.
The IDS Center was brand new when I took command of the carpets on four of its 52 floors. To me, the offices were super fancy and beautiful. They were all carpeted in a thick luxurious pile carpet that felt like walking on a cloud and that created a soft muffled diffusion of sounds and voices. It was the kind of thick pile carpet that leaves footprints and roller tracks from the chairs with wheels.
Now that I was a a professional vacuumer, I had as part of my pro gear a vacuum on wheels with a yellow canister roughly the size of a half-height oil barrel - with a long thick corrugated grey Slinky-like hose and a wide wand perfect for pile carpets. Just like operating on humans, my vacuuming skills evolved with practice.
At the start of my vacuuming journey I'd open the door to each office, walk in, and start vacuuming right at the entrance and then vacuum my through the rest of the carpet in a random pinball-like fashion until I had vacuumed the whole place.
Then, after a few days, I noticed something that started to bug me, a lot.
My original vacuuming routine was simple: to go up to a desk, vacuum around the desk first, then behind the chair, then pull the chair out, vacuum under the desk, and finally push the chair back into position so the back was neatly up against the desk edge. Nice and super tidy!
The thing that started to bug me? I noticed that when I rolled the chair back under the desk, it left tire tracks on the thick, plush pile carpet. In fact, now that I was awakened from my carpet vacuuming slumber and my innocent, inexperienced indifference, it sparked a new awareness of the entire carpet landscape of each office. Suddenly I could see a sea of imprints left behind everywhere - by the chairs, my shoes, and even the wand doing the hard, up front, in its face, work of sucking up dirt and debris left by the day's business activities of the rich.
In response to my newfound carpet awareness, I created a system to prevent all of these unwanted unsightly footprints, chair wheel marks, and vacuum wand tracks. I started my vacuuming routine in the very back of each office and, working in a strictly backwards format, backed out slowly while I methodically ensured that I smoothed out the thick plush pile carpet by lifting the wand up and doing a vacuum backstroke toward me, then lifting the wand up again, moving it laterally to the next contiguous stretch of carpet, and repeating this maneuver sequentially over and over as I backed up.
It worked beautifully. Every square inch of my carpets were perfectly smooth. I took great delight when I reached the door to the office as I looked out at the calm smooth ocean of thick plush pile carpet that I had brought under control. Super satisfying, and when I imagined the gasps of pleasure of the first person to open the door in the morning upon encountering the sea of carpet calm - well, it made me feel great.
So why am I telling you this story? Because, I literally realized today, while thinking back on my time at the IDS, that my carpet "issue" or "obsession" as some of you might call it, was a signal, a profound premonition of my deeper neurologic wiring that would surface from the neuronal ocean in my brain over and over again in my life. If had been more aware of this deeper neurological wiring, it could have helped me make better decisions along my career path.
The premonition that has proven itself to be true over and over and over again in my life - the one that might seem quirky or even irritating to others? My love of figuring out a system for anything, from the best way to manage my bathroom "toilet paper operations" to trying to create the best system of perfection for each operation I performed as a surgeon.
I love (and I mean love) to take any issue, small or large, problem or not, and find the best way, based on fact, evidence, experience, and intuition and create a system that can work, for myself, and for others. From the best way to organize a dishwasher to mastering the exact details of how to conduct an operation, it all thrills me.
While some might consider this feature of mine a bug (like anyone who has to deal with my dishwasher situation) it is actually it is one of my superpowers 🤩 that has played a key role in finding fulfillment in what I do in life, and in helping me to serve others.
In my academic career at the University, this feature of mine led to several innovations:
- I revamped the clinical surgery clerkship with a new system of off-the-shelf standardized written tests, oral exams, and interviews of medical students at the end of each rotation to gather feedback about faculty and resident teaching which I then shared with them through written letters. The course became the highest ranked clinical clerkship in the medical school.
- When the 80 hour workweek for resident training hit, it became clear that we needed to become more efficient and effective in our teaching of residents. I created a system called Rotations as a Course. Now, instead of residents rotating through a service and spending time operating and reading on their own, there were core essential topics to be covered with individual faculty with assigned readings with oral and written exams. The residents on my service loved it since it provided structure with clear expectations, and I now had more objective metrics to evaluate each residents progress.
- The Four Seasons patient experience. The patient experience at our hospital was (I am being gentle here) often hit or miss. It drove me crazy that patients who are suffering could receive what I call transactional care - done correctly but without the small human touches that can transform an experience. So I went to the best in the business - the Four Seasons Hotel, and asked corporate in Toronto for their secret sauce.
They blew me off at first, but my persistence paid off. The secret sauce was: 1) Get the standards right, 2) What about me, and 3) Wow me if you can. Since I could not control the whole hospital, I decided to create a boutique Four-Seasons-like Thoracic Surgical Service.
An example: On rounds we got the standards right by all of us (me, residents, and medical students) entering the room together, all pagers on silent, gathering around the patient's bed with all eyes and focus on the patient's situation, me sitting on the edge of the bed, and one resident manning the computer to show the patient their x-rays. No one was allowed to answer pages or leave the room unless it was an emergency. What about me meant we all knew the patient's name and where they were from and any details that could make them feel noticed. Wow me if you can came in things like the resident conveying important imaging results to the patient during the day before rounds to alleviate the anxiety of waiting until I rounded late in the afternoon.
The system worked like magic. Patients loved being on our service despite their misery, and it played a significant role in building my practice through word of mouth.
I have thought a lot about the elements of my career that either sucked the life out of me or gave me energy and enthusiasm. Over and over, I was most fulfilled when I was creatively solving a complex problem, like the ones I described above. Whenever I veered away from my superpower and did things that I hated, the more miserable I became.
The problem? I was unaware of the notion of fulfillment vs success. So when I was doing something that I was bored with or disliked (committee meetings, academic paper reviews, many talks, most of my research, to name a few) that made me feel miserable, I figured I was lacking discipline or being weak, so I just kept slogging through it all, not realizing what was really going on with my unique brain begging me to follow the divining rod of what it was uniquely wired to do.
I didn't know the power of the word No to bring my life into focus on fulfillment.
I learned the hard way that the path to fulfillment (which, ironically leads to much greater success) is to say Hell Yes to my unique neurological divining rod and to say Hell No to as much of the rest of it as possible. The sooner one figures this stuff out, the better - and richer - one's life will become.
So what is your vacuuming story?
