The call room we theoretically sleep in while on call is located at the end of a long long white hallway, which for some reason evokes The Shining and seems to lengthen exponentially as the night evolves. Around 1am, this hallway feels completely interminable and the call room starts to feel like some mirage of a desert oasis. Whenever, miraculously, I find that I'm caught up on my charting and I've seen all the patients on my list, I amble towards the 2 south side of the hospital (very casually, and by a different path every time, I don't want to alert the pager-gods to the fact that I am actually thinking about sleeping. This ires them). Once I reach the end of that hallway, I accelerate into a full-on power walk, and now it is simply a race to reach the room, kick of my clogs, and climb into bed for a glorious 5 - 15 minutes until the pager goes off again.

Sometimes, just to tease me, the page comes the second I turn the light off. 99% of the time I don't even make it past the doorway.

If the stars align and I actually have a 30 - 45 minute break, the pager gods watching over the other residents in the call-suite will make sure that every single other beeper in the suite is set to maximum volume, goes off every 5 minutes, and that the resident-owner of that pager will have the slowest beep-silencing reflexes of all time. As well as the loudest possible telephone voice. They also arrange it so that every single door of the suite slams when you go through it, no matter how gently.

Hmmm. . . .