My Boss Took My Badge Beside The Break Room Refrigerator

Heath set my badge beside my lunch, right on the little stars I had drawn across the lid.

“Six bad studies,” he said. “Six refunds, if we can't fix this.”

The refrigerator hummed behind him. Outside, rain beat on the parking lot of Bayou Lantern Sleep Center in Lafayette. It was seven in the morning. I had been awake for twenty-three hours.

“Which studies?” I asked.

“That's exactly the kind of question we don't have time for.”

I was a twenty-eight-year-old Chinese American woman with a blunt black bob, straight brows, and a pale scar across my left thumb. My thumb was still sticky from the tape I used to hold sleep-study wires in place.

I worked nights as a sleep-study technologist. I placed scalp leads, checked breathing belts, watched oxygen levels, and helped scared people sleep in strange beds.

I liked the careful parts of the job. A loose chin lead could look like movement. A bad finger sensor could look like falling oxygen. Before calling something wrong with a person, I checked the wire.

Heath preferred faster answers.

Heath Varnell was a fifty-one-year-old white man with sandy hair, pink cheeks, and a soft belly under crisp fishing shirts.

He owned the clinic, knew everyone's favorite doughnut, and could sound kind while cutting your pay.

“The sync files are gone,” he said. “You cleaned the folder.”

“I cleared temporary exports after the backup finished. That's our written routine.”

“Well, the routine failed.”

“A sync file doesn't contain the patient's recording. It lines up the recorder clock with the desk clock. We should still have—”

He raised one hand.

“Vivian. Please. Plain English.”

He understood plain English when a vendor offered a discount.

I looked down at my lunch container. Five tiny dots made a crooked W. I drew constellations on the lids because the nights were long and the clinic windows showed mostly parking lights.

He slid a memo across the table.

Effective immediately, I would stop patient care. My new work was scanning old consent forms in the supply room. My pay would drop from $26 to $19 an hour. The memo said my “failure to preserve required files” had caused invalid studies.

“Sign the bottom,” he said.

“It says I agree.”

“It says we discussed it.”

I wrote, Received only. Findings disputed. Then I dated my copy.

His smile stayed up, but his fingers went flat against the table.

“That seems a little dramatic.”

“I want the dates and recorder numbers.”

“Let the adults sort out the billing.”

He left with my badge.

The adults. I sat there until the ice pack under my rice stopped feeling cold.

At home, I took a blue notebook from my kitchen drawer.

Most people thought it was where I doodled stars. There were stars in it, in the corners. The middle of each page held numbers.

Recorder number. Start time. Clock offset. Restart time. End time.

Two years earlier, after a recorder lost its clock setting, I had asked to keep a paper clock log. Heath had approved it by email. No patient names, no birth dates, no copies of recordings. I could keep my own notebook as a record of my equipment checks.

“Fine,” he had written. “Your little astronomy project might save us a service call.”

I had printed that email and tucked it inside the cover.

I turned to February 6.

Recorder Three had started forty-three seconds behind the desk clock. At 1:17 a.m., I had corrected it after a brief power blink. At 3:06, I had spent six minutes and thirty-two seconds replacing a bad leg lead.

I remembered that night because water had crept under the back door. I had used an entire roll of blue shop towels to stop it.

That afternoon, my coworker Ana called.

“He says you erased patient data.”

“Did he put that in writing?”

“At the staff meeting.”

“Write down what you heard. Keep it.”

She lowered her voice.

“He's opening another place. His sister's name is on the papers. They're moving two recorders over there Friday.”

I looked at my notebook again.

“Which two?”

“Three and Four.”

I did not tell her what I was thinking. A clock error could happen twice. A missing file could be a mistake. I needed more than a bad feeling and an ugly morning.

I slept four hours, then went back to scan consent forms.

A woman waited by the locked supply-room door, holding a travel envelope and a clinic bill.

“Are you Vivian Zhao?” she asked. “They charged me $1,460 for sleeping here on July fourteenth.”

She tapped the envelope.

“I was playing drums in Denver.”