Josh drove home from work frustrated. The beautiful view of the sound as he drove down into the Edmonds bowl didn’t cheer him up like it usually did. And the fact that the Mariners game always went static half way down the hill didn’t help. Every patient today had not been doing his home exercises as instructed and were therefore not seeing the results Josh had expected. He hadn’t been doing his job long enough to just let it go. The other practitioners at the clinic could just shrug. It didnt’ bother them anymore that some people really didnt’ want to get all, as long as there were the few star patients who improved drastically and made great efforts to be more healthy.

He pulled into the garage at 515 Walnut street and sat in the car for a few more minutes listening to the scratchy but audible Mariners game in hopes of a home run to put him in a better mood. No such luck. He got out of car and noticed George in the corner of the garage, going through a storage closet.

“Hi George,” said Josh, feeling that he should do the neighbourly thing and at least say hello, “How was your day?”

“Oh the usual,” said George, emerging from the closet with a large box, “Breakfast and paper, walk to the dog park with Leroy, coffee, reading, lunch, nap, more reading, maybe some TV . . .”

“Sounds like a nice life,” said Josh, “don’t you get bored?”

“Of course,” said George, opening the box and looking through it, “That’s why I’m down here rifling through boxes trying to find my old slide-viewer. A friend of mine says we can get all our slides onto the computer and saved on CDs. Figure it will save the kids a lot of time, if I go through them all now.”

“How many kids do you have?” asked Josh.

“Two. A son in California in the film business. We don’t hear from him much. And our daughter in Spokane. The grandkids come stay with us every few months. You’ll meet them soon.”

“Hmmm,” Josh nodded and turned to go the steps.

“How was your day?” George asked, his head deep in the back of the closet again as he pulled out the next box.

“Fine,” said Josh. He paused for a second, “If you were going to a physical therapist because you were in a lot of pain and he or she gave you great exercises to do at home so that you could get better faster, would you do them?”

George straightened up and looked at Josh with a smile.

“Nope,” he said, “I probably couldn’t be bothered.”

Josh laughed.

“That’s honest,” he said, “Most of them say they’re too busy or too tired or can’t remember. Or they lie and say they have done them, but I can tell that they haven’t.”

“Well,” said George, “I think we do things like that all the time. I call it the ‘Generally Disregarded Advice’ category, where all useful instructions get filed that we don’t actually want to do. The barrier is usually the perceived amount of effort we would have to put in. We keep them tucked away in the folder, knowing we should do those things, but mostly choosing to ignore them.”

“But they’re paying to receive the advice!”

“You can’t fight where they file your advice,” George laughed, “I used to give my kids very clear instructions, study these chapters, read these sections, do the sample test questions at the end of the section and you’ll be well prepared for the test. How many kids do you think did it?”

“Not many?” asked Josh.

“Usually only 5-6 kids,” he said, “The rest would complain there was a question on something we didn’t talk about it class. It was always in the sections I had told them to read. First few years I felt like kicking a wall. Then I realized it was probably good for me. Kept me humble, knowing there were 50 or 60 kids disregarding my excellent advice.”

Josh sighed.

“How many of your patients are male?” George asked.

“Today? All of them,” said Josh.

“Not to be biased,” said George, winking, “But from one man to another, we men don’t like to follow other people’s advice that much . . .  especially when it comes to health care.”

Josh grinned. George was funnier than he thought.

“Have a good night, George,” he said on his way out.