NOTE: Today’s post is a little graphic. Morgue thoughts ahead… Hop off here if a little fluids talk gets to you.

Today during our usual afternoon chat at work, my boss Tim was telling me about a book he’s been reading that he’s enjoyed.

Written by Iceland author Arnuldar Indridason, “Jar City” is a detective thriller that includes a number of dark and seedy incidents that are worthy of the Girl with the Tattoo novel comparisons. From the sounds of it, the book is pretty fascinating, and from reviews on IMDB, the 2006 movie was pretty good as well.

Because the book delves some into morgue world, it’s about then that Tim asked me if he had told me about when he worked as a janitor at Lovelace Hospital. I hadn’t.

“I worked late and usually was downstairs cleaning in and around the kitchen. Sometimes, though, when the staff was short or one of his hands was out, I’d be called over to help clean up in the adjacent morgue.”

“I basically had to go in and wiped everything down and get rid of the garbage in the room.” In this case, the garbage often included blood and tissue. “I had to open and empty this one bottom drawer”, Tim shared. “I didn’t have to do anything with the upper drawers because they held corpses, but that one bottom drawer usually had a pail of guts in it that had to go into the facility incenerator.” It was just understood that that was the junk drawer.

Except for the time Tim went to empty out that drawer, and it held a single adult leg with a tag on the toe that said “Do Not Throw Away.”

The pathologist who performed the autopsies was an older man, Tim said, and I guess okay for the times, he had a tendency away from neat and orderliness in his work. Tim had to clean the walls and ceiling of swaths of blood and tissue from when earlier the doctor indelicately made cuts into the corpse with the circular saw. Or he had to remove hand prints from the wall or from the doctor’s coffee mug from where the doctor leaned or clamped with a bloodied hand.

I pretty much sat their and just tried to process what he must have had to deal with as he talked about those experiences.

Right there are a few reasons I respect Tim a lot. A) He did that job. I could not do that job. B) He can talk about that job now with no qualms. Remarkable.

His tale did leave me wondering: How do you evaluate pathologists on the work they do? Does tidiness come into play very much? I suppose it does these days, but evidently it didn’t much back then. He was considered a decent pathologist- but, apparently, a little sloppy.

I also wondered why the hospital’s morgue was right by the kitchen.