The other day, for reasons I won't bore you with, I had to go see someone in a hospital. At this particular hospital, visitors check in at a front desk and they're given a little I.D. adhesive badge to affix to their clothing before they continue upstairs. The badges are color-coded. If you're going to see someone on the second floor, you get an orange badge. For the third floor, you get a green badge. Fourth floor gets a blue badge and so on. Or at least, that was the code the day I was there.
Ahead of me was a couple going to the fourth floor. Fourth floor that day was purple. This presented a problem for the lady since she was wearing a pale green outfit and purple badges of that particular shade, she felt, just didn't go with what she was wearing. "I want a yellow badge," she announced.
The man at the desk rolled his eyes slightly but did a fairly good job of suppressing his annoyance. "You can't have a yellow badge," he told her, "unless you're going to see someone on the fifth floor."
"That's a silly rule," she said. Her companion — a boy friend or husband — promptly adopted that posture of, "I know how this game is played and I ain't getting involved." He'd obviously been through this kind of thing before with her at least a thousand times.
The gentleman behind the desk explained that was the rule. He also pointed out that he didn't make the rule, nor did he have the power to change the rule.
The lady asked, "Who would know if you gave me a yellow badge instead? I want to look nice for my friend." Then she also added, in case the man at the desk didn't quite grasp the concept, "He's in the hospital."
This went on for…well, anything over about nine seconds would have been too long. It went on long enough that I leaned in and told the lady, "It might save us all time if you just went home and changed your outfit."
She asked me, "What do you mean?"
I replied, "Madam, you are a woman of stunning beauty." She wasn't really but it's always okay to lie about these things. I continued, "You are so good-looking that no two inch by three inch peel-and-stick could possibly impair your loveliness. It is beneath you to even consider that."
The boy friend or husband gave me a look as if to say, "Not a bad try. Let's see if it works."
She considered what I'd said was beneath her dignity to consider and decided to just accept the compliment (and the purple badge) and be off. As they headed for the elevator, she was heard to tell her companion, "Remind me when I come tomorrow to wear something that goes with purple."
The man at the desk then began the process of logging me in and issuing me a badge. Noting that he had no red ones in his rack, I told him, "I'd like one in red with little flecks of white and maybe some sequins and a gold brocade." He laughed and told me, "I'm sure glad I'm not working tomorrow. Tomorrow, when she shows up in her outfit that goes well with purple, they'll have a whole different color for the fourth floor."