the bladder scanner as postmodern metaphor

When I was staff at Hospital of Doom, we had this bladder scanner. And when I say "we had this bladder scanner," I mean we had one bladder scanner for 511 beds. That's right, folks. One.

It was old and I thought of it as a useless generator of random numbers from 0-900. Not only that, the sheer effort it took to locate where in the hospital the bladder scanner might currently be hanging out (never mind getting an order to use it in the first place) added such exponential layers of exquisitely soviet redundancy and bureaucracy to an already frustratingly pointless undertaking, that it was often easier to weasel one's way out of Bladder Scanner Limbo, pretend you did it, and just make up a number, without bothering to locate the damn machine in the first place.

Lately, I feel like that old, much-maligned bladder scanner--broken, overworked, and yet still shimmied and jostled endlessly from place to place, obliged to spit out useless information in a reliably imprecise and inaccurate way.

I'm so tired, and have been running on empty for so long, that I feel like the bladder scanner and I, metaphorically, are one: both symbolic and symptomatic of the American working class and their damnation to an eternal redundancy, inconsistency and arcane uselessness--hopelessly overworked, reliably ineffectual, consistently broken, and endlessly ridiculous.