"Oh God, I really should have explained this last night but I don't know where to start. Some people can't get jobs, and don't have any family, so they end up with nothing. There are charities that try to help, with food and things, but there isn't enough, it's like trying to drain the ocean. Anything anyone gives them just disappears and a month later they're as poor as they were before."

Like trying to drain the ocean. Merrin swallows hard. "I - how many people. And - why can't they get jobs - what's going wrong there -?" 

"They can't get jobs because there aren't enough companies to hire them and there aren't enough companies because people are too poor to buy things, and because the government keeps making it harder. Passing laws about what anyone can make and who they can sell it to, taxing us and sending it all overseas as aid shipments that do no good even if they don't get sunk by pirates on the way."

"....I guess I get why they want to help out the places that are doing even worse than - this," Merrin says faintly. "But - is it getting worse, here, too..." 

"Yes."

WHAT is WRONG with this place. 

...Now is really not the time to get incredibly upset about the question, let alone to try to answer it. 

"I - sorry, I need a minute." If she gets a job here, Merrin promises herself - and she's confident she should, even if everything around her is broken, they would have to be worse than stupid to turn her down and Eddie claims at least one person in this hospital is neither stupid nor FLAMING INSANE - then she'll have money, and she can at least go find out if the 'charities' trying to help are doing it at all competently, and give them a little more resources and maybe some advice on using them efficiently, and - 

- one task at a time, the thing to do with insurmountable impossible problems is to break them down into pieces until each individual piece is no longer impossible and then do them. While not being incredibly shortsighted about it, of course, and while keeping in mind all the possible failure modes of un-nuanced problem-solving, but...she can do that. Probably. As long as she doesn't have to do all of it at once and all of it on her own. 

Eddie stands on the street corner and ignores the confused and annoyed glances of the passers-by and waits for Merrin to be ready to keep going. He understands; he has been there before and expects he will again.

And after a few minutes Merrin still isn't feeling that ready to keep going, but she is noticing the annoyed passersby, which is SOCIALLY AWKWARD and gets in the way of effectively finishing any of her thoughts anyway. 

"We can go in now," she murmurs to Eddie. 

Once they're into the (much less trafficked) hospital foyer, Eddie asks, "Do you want a minute alone first? I can go find Carson while you wait here if you want."

Merrin starts to shake her head, and then stops to actually think. "- Sure. I can wait here. Um, although I'm hoping we can actually talk somewhere more - private, than this...?" 

"Of course. Once I've found him we can come get you and find a meeting room." Earth does have meeting rooms! Probably Merrin's world has much nicer and more correct meeting rooms that somehow produce better meetings but at least it isn't another 'I don't know what that is.'

A meeting room! Maybe it will even have whiteboards! 

"Sounds good." 

She doesn't especially want to dwell on the fact that one of this world's horrifying problems is people literally starving in the streets because they can't get jobs because Governance is following advice from economics who are INSANE OR SOMETHING. Instead she paces around a bit and looks at everything in the foyer and tries to extract some sort of useful information about how hospitals here are going to be different from the ones she's familiar with. 

Well, for one thing, the visible level of computer technology is indeed None. There's a receptionist with a desk covered in papers and a telephone. Someone comes in to visit her mother, who has the flu, and the receptionist directs her to an elevator to the correct ward. 

One wall has a moderately dilapidated fake plant and a bulletin board with information on public housing and addiction counseling, ads for day cares, a requests for people between the ages of 18 and 60 for a study on lung health, and a Found Cat poster. 

Also the whole area is kind of dirty. There's no visible garbage or anything, just the kind of desultory grimyness that results from all the cleaning being done by one underpaid guy with a mop and a bucket.

Ewwwww. Merrin is not squeamish about blood, urine, feces, vomit, or just about any bodily fluids, and is only slightly squeamish about dead bodies though that took some training, but she is apparently actually bothered by grime in the SICK PEOPLE PLACE. You should NOT HAVE THAT. She's pretty sure it doesn't even require advanced technology to keep your FLOORS CLEAN. 

Needing to have after-the-fact addiction counseling, if she's parsing that right, sounds like exactly the sort of a problem a society would have if they lacked the concept of infohazards and of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods. 'Public housing' seems to be tugging on some of the same connotations as Quiet Cities but mostly not. She should ask about that. ...Actually she should make a note to ask about that later when it's actually the priority. 

She wonders if they have some kind of after-the-fact selection process to make the study participants somewhat less of an incredibly skewed sample than what you would get if your only selection mechanism was for both 'people who spend a lot of time in hospital foyers' and 'people who actually read the posters and, having actually read the posters, are inclined to volunteer themselves'. It also doesn't mention compensation for their time, which seems like a very basic oversight to her. 

Dath ilan would never have the receptionist's job done by a human, but she's not sure how much that's because there might be literally no level of compensation that would persuade someone to do a job that intensely boring for more than fifteen minutes. (Her desk is also a mess, but Merrin isn't inclined to judge her that hard, some people are just like that and you would expect a world with fewer resources in general to have fewer services for avoiding that problem.) 

Why the fake plant. It seems to be accomplishing NONE of the goals one would expect for having a plant indoors; it's not pretty and it's clearly not reducing indoor CO2 levels. 

She sighs and paces a bit and waits for Eddie, wondering how long it's going to take him to track down Carson; that, too, seems informative, though informative-of-what she's not sure. 

It only takes Eddie two minutes to get to Carson's office and two minutes for them to walk to the foyer, but Eddie's gone for a total of eight minutes because Carson was on the phone with his bleach supplier and then got stopped on the way out of his office by a payroll clerk with a question. All Merrin can easily perceive of this is the eight minutes.

Carson is a thin man who looks like he'd blow away in a stiff breeze, with wispy grey hair and intelligent grey eyes. He holds out a hand for what an Earthling would recognize as a handshake as says, "So you're the foreign doctor Willers has been telling me about? I don't mind telling you, we're always looking for good people."

Merrin looks blankly at his hand for half a second, and then extends her own hand and...hopes he's going to give her slightly more cues than this about what she's supposed to do with it. 

"Yes. Um, well, I'm not technically a doctor - I'm a trained emergency first responder for - exceptional situations - but I suspect I'm very highly trained compared to what you would be used to here for that role." In hindsight it's going to be very awkward to try to have this entire conversation without mentioning the part where she's from a different Civilization. Maybe she can check in with Eddie about that, once she's said or done anything to impress Carson and ensure his priors on 'she's just insane' will be lower. "I don't have any of my papers here, so of course I understand if you want to run me through your usual qualification tests, but - I do think that I'm very good at my job, and would be pretty good at - a decently wide range of things here, whatever is most valuable to you. Should we, um, go talk about this more in a meeting room?" 

Carson grabs her hand and moves it up and then down and then lets it go. "Yes, of course, right this way."

They go through a door and down a hall and into a room with a table and four of the unergonomic Earthling chairs in it.

Once they're all settled, Carson says, "I don't have time to run qualification tests. If you're good you're good and if you're not I'll fire you. If you're an emergency responder, what do think of ER work?"

"...Um, no offense, but Eddie has been telling me a bit about your local personnel issues and I'm not sure how effective your mechanisms would be for noticing if I'm any good at my job or not. What would you be paying attention to, to figure that out - patient outcomes? How happy my colleagues are? ...Also I think I maybe need clarification about what your 'ER's look like, where I'm from I don't think we have one facility that corresponds to that. Can you briefly describe the range of patients I would expect to see, there?" 

"Patient outcomes, yes. Though ideally you also wouldn't drive your colleagues too insane," he adds with a chuckle. "Our ER is where patients come in with emergencies and we determine the right priority order to treat them in and get the first steps of treatment done, or the whole of it if it's something simple, and then send them either home or to another hospital ward depending."

"And there's - only one facility serving that purpose, for this hospital?" That's probably a stupid question but she should check. "Um, how are the roles and specializations divided up? I'm guessing it's going to be different from how we do it where I'm from, but I can at least figure out what maps over the best to what my qualifications are." 

Carson goes over the various wards in the hospital, sorted mostly by how sick the patients are but with some extra sorting for keeping the contagious ones away from everyone else, and the kinds of doctor and nurse and what they do. It's typical for a hospital to only have one ER, unless the architecture is such that patients arriving by ambulance and those arriving on foot need to show up at different entrances. The jobs most similar to Merrin's training are probably ER nurse and paramedic, and paramedics are generally expected to have driver's licenses so they can take turns driving the ambulance.

Merrin doesn't need to be following exactly what a 'driver's license' is in order to know that she doesn't have one and doesn't have the requisite skills to easily get one and probably doesn't WANT one. 

"I think the ER nurse role would be the best match, probably. Should the next step here be...going and meeting the current roster of ER nurses?" 

"Certainly. Right this way."

Eddie takes his leave, saying that he's glad they seem to be getting along and that he has a meeting to get to.

The other ER nurses currently on this shift prove to range from 'kind of dim for an ER nurse but putting in almost enough effort to compensate' to 'really exceedingly dim and also kind of an asshole'.

Merrin introduces herself to them with smiles and friendly professionalism, which are perhaps somewhat off from the local social conventions, but she's not especially trying to get that perfect and she has more important priorities than the occasional noticeably-jarring mismatch there. 

She mostly isn't trying to draw any conclusions about intelligence, conscientiousness, or asshole-ish-ness, because she expects that all of the indicators she normally pays attention to will be drowned in noise. It's nonetheless hard not to notice that basically every single person she interacts with is, to her, noticeably...verbally slow on their feet?

(Dath ilan uses a sophisticated set of metrics for intelligence tests, and Merrin is aware that whatever she's noticing is not just indicative of a specific underlying capability, and can be split out into multiple aspects, some of which correlate with different elements of the basic seven intelligence-subcomponents, and also probably any of what she's picking up on is just education or acculturation, but she's not actually trying to do a formal or even an informal assessment right now and she wouldn't be especially qualified to run that anyway and so she mostly tries to ignore her surface impressions.) 

Mostly Merrin's attention is occupied by the fact that she has so many questions! About literally everything! She would normally just be able to ASK all her questions, but unfortunately 1) this language is TERRIBLE and it would take her ten times as many words which just feels like a waste of everyone's time, and 2) she isn't yet sure of the cultural norms here around question-asking and it's unusually salient to her that she needs to sound impressive and make a good first impression in order to get anyone to listen to her later rather than thinking that she's insane or something. 

(Merrin is, in the back of her mind, aware that she is probably overthinking all of this, but to be fair it's REALLY HARD to NOT do that when none of her trained reflexes are recognizing any of the equipment or protocols or even the nonverbal communication of her new colleagues.) 

From the perspective of the other ER nurses, Merrin seems very calm and level and also talks like a - college professor in philosophy? Her smiles look genuine and friendly but she only thinks to smile once every couple of minutes, not necessarily at the usual cues for it, and she doesn't spend long on it. Most of her questions are about what particular equipment does, or about the limits of what she as an ER nurse would be authorized to decide on her own versus needing to call in a different specialist (and if so, what specialist).

Some of her questions are much less comprehensible than that; Merrin at one point forgets that prediction markets aren't a thing here, and tries to ask how she should consult the diagnosticians' prediction market, and then sort of stumbles to a halt halfway through that sentence once she notices how many words it's going to take to explain and then remembers that obviously that isn't a thing here. 

Some of them explain what the equipment does and who's authorized to do what, illustrated with anecdotes of recent patients. (Some of them are judging her for being weird and foreign and using long words on purpose and doing facial expressions oddly, but they're keeping it out of their words and mostly out of their faces because at their current level of understaffed they all want her to stick around, weird foreigner or no.) The aborted question about prediction markets gets a bemused explanation that they don't do whatever that is but it's fine and often important to ask someone else for a second opinion if you're not sure what to do.