Vacation

I was amazed to see businesses in Europe close for an entire month or even several months. I mean, you can’t get a temp for that period of time? You can’t stagger the vacations? How can you still be paying rent on a busy street, and not be open for business 1/12 of the year? Perhaps summer is just not a time to buy furniture and it’s cheaper that way.

But the heat wave in Europe apparently caught hospitals understaffed. Hospitals. I know the comparisons are obvious with the Chicago heatwave of a few years ago: the city delayed the kind of reactions it should have taken early, making announcements on the radio about how to keep cool and how it’s especially important for the elderly. Hey grandma, hop on down to the cinematheque or the supermarche and stand in the frozen-food aisle for a spell.

But come on! How can a hospital just sort of close down for the summer? It’s not a designer-furniture store! Maybe there are fewer people in the city, and therefore fewer patients? It makes so little sense.