ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways and extent to which the hospital porters might be described, nonetheless, as ‘people of the screen’. The world of computing, it might be said, flattens the hospital hierarchy of skilled grades into buyers and sellers and, by putting the porters in touch with London hotels, Italian motorbikes and Hong Kong football agents, transcends its borders. The buckie is the institutional centre of portering activities in the hospital. It is here that the chargehands sit, at a desk with four telephones, receiving jobs from around the hospital, writing each in the task-book, and apportioning them. The sexual exceptionalism and uncivility that the Web gave onto, in words, followed regular relational paths in its being ‘downloaded’ into the routine space of the hospital. The chapter ends by considering whether the appropriation by the hospital porters of these new technologies represents a departure from other behaviours and attitudes of ‘personalization’ which they might manifest in the work-place.
