The Humerus Daily

HELL, MI— When Dante penned his description of the nine circles of Hell in Inferno, it’s truly perplexing how he managed to overlook the torment of the Morristown rotation at SKMC. Indeed, if you, dear reader, have ever been strapped to a harsh, wooden table while a dirty needle moves towards you agonizingly slowly, threatening to penetrate your eye like in that one James Bond movie, you’d understand a fraction of a fraction of the experience of rotating in Morristown, according to our pool of anonymous sources. 

For starters, the living situation is dire. Not to be confused with Moorestown, the WASP capital of the eastern seaboard, located a bit under an hour’s drive from Philadelphia, Morristown is a boring town found in the suburbs of New York just a half hour west of where the Jets and Giants spend their fall Sundays losing football games. Aside from a small main street lined with restaurants and ice cream parlors in its downtown section, there is startlingly little for a wee rotator to occupy their time with. Students are instead generously squeezed into dormitory-style apartments with a roommate, where they are encouraged to stare at each other from their twin beds in silence. Like the general in Don’t Look Up who charges visitors for free snacks in the White House, students in the dorms are required to purchase a ten-dollar laundry card, which they must then load with additional funds to do laundry. However, unlike the movie, no snacks are involved, and students are adamantly encouraged to look up so that they may pass the hours counting pockmarks on the ceiling. 

Life on the wards is not much better, as students find that their long days working alongside overworked and undercaffeinated residents and support staff may culminate in 24-hour weekend shifts spent in rooms whose frigid temperatures would make a polar bear blush. The entire hospital has an eerie feel about it, kind of like a dungeon before a basilisk emerges and turns everyone to stone, which, judging by the general attitude of everyone working there, may be a preferable alternative. At the rotation’s end, many students can be found chucking their irritating pagers into a nearby ravine or otherwise gathering around a bonfire to burn them as a ritualistic sacrifice to the evil deity that brought them to Morristown. 

This is not to say that rotating in Morristown is all bad, of course. After all, students do (eventually) get to leave. However, if given the choice, it seems like venturing through the fiery pits described by Dante or subjecting oneself to the fine array of torture devices found in a medieval dungeon may make for a more pleasant, and warmer, experience.