Volunteers Get a Dose of Safeness

It costs money to enter the Chinese Garden. Eight dollars and fifty cents, to be exact, if you're not in a special category allowing you to mooch off of the hale, hearty, and productive. For your money you get a ticket that's potent until the greeter at the entrance castrates it by ripping off its stub. Neutered, it's just a bookmark, for anyone who still reads books.

But as you should know by now, nothing's quite normal at the Chinese Garden. If you were to present your ticket to the greeter today, it would be looked at hungrily but would be allowed to pass without castration. The greeters have been instructed to not rip the stub or even touch the ticket. Instead of ending up with a bookmark, you now have a ticket that is good for another day! And another day. And another, etc. Not that management is worried about anyone taking advantage of that fact. Any rumpled tickets will naturally be rejected by the greeter.

The official reason for management's strange directive is ... swine flu! The greeter won't get the flu from the ticket holder if the greeter doesn't touch the ticket . . . unless he touches the recycled visitor's guides, or the railings, or the faucets in the bathroom, or any number of surfaces found in the real world, which management doesn't seem to inhabit.

So what's the real reason? It's to strenuously impress upon the volunteer corp that management CARES about their health. REALLY, they do!