I’m sitting behind the marble desk, doodling a cartoon of a girl with a speech bubble coming out of her mouth. It says, “Welcome to Mount Sinai Hospital, home of the hospital burger. May I take your order, please?” At least, that’s what I was doing before the trickle of people coming through the revolving doors in front of me turned into an inundation.

The desk sits just inside those front doors: a tall, wide semi-circle as cold and gray as dirty ice. It is an unmistakable horseshoe brand of authority crammed into the tiny lobby, perhaps built that way because all the volunteers who use it are either too young or too old to be authoritative without the help of such an imposing behemoth. Above me is a sloped ceiling with glass panels, and on either side of me are stairways leading down to Guggenheim Pavilion and up to Annenberg. A security guard stands to the right of the desk, checking the badges of legitimate employees and leaving me to deal with mostly everyone else. I am aided only by a series of binders and sheaves of paper allegedly containing all the information I might need. In actuality, they contain maybe half, a good portion of which is mis-filed, indexed under the wrong heading, or just plain incorrect.

At times like these, the busy times, this desk makes a fragile bulwark against the masses. At other times, the times when I can sit for half an hour and find nobody to help, it seems ridiculous for me to sit behind this huge desk, but this is one of those times when my hands are flying, flipping through reference books and handing out maps, all the while having five different conversations at once. On my left, a woman is complaining loudly that her car service was supposed to pick her up three hours ago and isn’t here yet; I refrain from telling her that this is the general modus operandi for Avet, a car service I have come to loathe simply because I have to take so much flak for their perpetual tardiness. A deliveryman from the Chinese restaurant down the street doesn’t speak English and has only 1468 Madison written on his order slip, an address that is valid for every building in this city-block sized hospital. He yells at me in another language, and I finally just wave my hands at him and shake my head. We are snobbish about deliverymen here; they are “not our responsibility,” and so although I usually end up helping them out of pity for their confusion, if there are too many people waiting I’ll just wave them off. At the moment, there are five or six people crowding around the desk awaiting my attention. Some wait more patiently than others, but all are distressed to some degree, ranging from an ‘I don’t really want to be here’ expression on the face to loud, expletive-laden vitriol directed at the hospital in general and me in particular.

I have no time to think about anything except fielding one person after another, phoning various locations around the hospital looking for patients and doctors, flipping through just about all of my reference books, occasionally having to lapse into somewhat broken Spanish as I try to direct people to their destinations in such a way that I will not find them wandering around with lost expressions on their faces in ten minutes. When it’s this busy, I don’t have time to escort people to even the most far away and well hidden of hospital locations, though when it is quiet I escort everyone who doesn’t give me a look of pure disgust when I suggest it.

Suddenly, as suddenly as it caught me up, the mad whirlwind dies down. The people waiting for their car service realize that no matter how loudly they yell they’re going to be here for another hour or two, the delivery guy goes back to his restaurant, hopefully to return with either a translator or a better order slip, and the stream of people frantic to make their 3:00-on-the-dot clinic appointments on time tapers off.

The lobby sinks into a restless slumber, ready to erupt again at a moment’s notice. I take advantage of the lull and go back to my doodling.