The first time he tried was forty years ago. An abject failure of course. Everyone did badly.
``A perfect thumb print is our aim,'' the instructor said, ``that way you get the best distribution of white cells.''
In later years it seemed to him that the cell distribution wasn't much affected by the quality of the slide, but still in the world of clinical hematology, a perfect thumb print slide with a long, but not too long, feather edge was the mark of a good technologist.
He tried. Sometimes he was successful. Sometimes in the course of a day he would achieve perfection twice or even three times. ``I'm on a roll,'' he would say.
The perfect size drop of blood deftly delivered from the tip of a capillary tube and touched lightly and quickly to the glass surface of a microscope slide. The grasping of another slide, quickly checked for imperfections along its edge. Placing the short edge of the second slide on the drop of blood at an angle of forty five degrees so that it spreads along the edge but does not reach the sides then the quick, firm push, spreading the blood along the slide, first flaring then tapering.
It could be perfection and he loved perfection. They had equipment that could do it, and the slides produced were fair, but none accomplished the perfect thumb-print.
It seemed a small thing to ask of himself, but wasn't it Somerset Maugham who said that the most difficult culinary attainment was a perfect soft boiled egg?
And now he was facing retirement. True mastery not achieved. His expertise in identifying leukemias and lymphomas now superseded by flow cytometry.
His attempts to get into management twenty or more years ago had all come to nothing. No master's degree, they said, or Marcia has more seniority or we decided to hire from Outside. He hadn't been out then. Still called Oscar ``my room mate'' and never defined a gender. Still everyone knew and that was no problem. Or was it?
So now here he was. An old grey med tech with nothing to show for it except a small but meticulous house in a rapidly gentrifying part of town and a Lexus with a hundred thousand miles on it.
``There's an MLT student coming in tomorrow, please help her with diffs,'' the e-mail said. OK fine, he would help her with diffs, show her how to make a perfect slide.
She was old. Late forties, older maybe. Carefully made up. Ethnic. He showed her how to make a slide.
``Like this?'' she asked, and dashed off perfection. Then another then another.
``Wow!'' he said and picked up the phone to call Employee Relations and arrange his retirement.