“(Doctor in bed) I dreamt I died and went to Heaven and they handed me some old Ms. magazines, a paper sheet, and made me sit in a little room with a bunch of other doctors.”

Sylvia cartoon strip

Source: 2000s, A Personal Odyssey (2000), Ch. 5 : Halls of Ivy
Context: In the summer of 1959, as in the summer of 1957, I worked as a clerk-typist in the headquarters of the U. S. Public Health Service in Washington. The people I worked for were very nice and I grew to like them. One day, a man had a heart attack at around 5 PM, on the sidewalk outside the Public Health Service. He was taken inside to the nurse's room, where he was asked if he was a government employee. If he were, he would have been eligible to be taken to a medical facility there. Unfortunately, he was not, so a phone call was made to a local hospital to send an ambulance. By the time this ambulance made its way through miles of Washington rush-hour traffic, the man was dead. He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. Nothing so dramatized for me the nature of a bureaucracy and its emphasis on procedures, rather than results.

Quoted by Mark Bonham Carter in his Introduction to the 1962 edition of The Autobiography of Margot Asquith (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962) p. xxxv.

This feeling was simply divine!
Recordações do Escrivão Isaias Caminha (1909)

[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/223751039709495298] <br class="br">Tweets by year, 2012

Broadcast from Buchenwald (1945)

Variant: If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. Časopis LIFE, január 1984

[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/11074098650] <br class="br">Tweets by year, 2010