Keep your first success to yourself. Never let it go to your head. Never gloat. Avoid at all cost walking around with a superior smile. These are some of the hints Gary ought to have kept in mind. They are all useful pieces of advice for anybody, in any sphere of life. It doesn’t just have to be advice aimed at Gary, a nephew of my prankster friend Barney.

Gary, fresh out of high school, has decided what he wants to be: A nurse. Two of his friends are nurses and they both received job offers even when they hadn’t as yet completed their course. Now they both earn a decent wage.

“I’m going to be a nurse,” Gary told the family one night at dinner. The family, in one collective heave, erupted, and for several minutes the laughter flowed like lava before anyone could speak.

When they all did regain control of their voices, the comments flew: “A nurse? You, Gary? Ha, ha, ha.” “Who’s the one that faints at the sight of blood?” “I’ve been looking for a laugh all day. Gary you’ve given me one at last. Ha, ha, ha.”

And so forth.

“It’s not just any nurse. I’m going to train to take care of the elderly,” Gary stated confidently. The others, by then, were in control of the helium bubbles rising in the chest. Despite the raging urge to crack up once more they organised their features so they could all look suitably attentive, lend the young lad a bit of support.

“Are you sure this is what you want to do?” asked his mother later, in private. “This isn’t just a peer thing? You want to be a nurse only because your two mates Andy and Rodger are nurses too? Friendship doesn’t work that way. Careers don’t work that way, either, Gary. I thought you were going to be a plumber like your dad. I think he was counting on that, too.” No, Gary had made up his mind. On the first day of training as an assistant nurse at a designated age care facility, he was shown how to make beds.

“The sheet on the bed is the only one that needs four ‘hospital corners’ all the rest have only two,” said the demonstrating trainer, a registered nurse, who proceeded to show the trainees what a ‘hospital corner’ is and how a sheet has to be triangulated to form such a corner. After that the trainees were let loose. “Go and make all the other beds.”

Gary, at the end of the half-day of bed-making, obtained an A. The only one to do so. It was his first success and after the derision he’d faced at home he can be excused for allowing it to go to his head; for permitting the swagger that took over his normal ambling gait; for becoming a trifle inattentive during the next few lectures, several of which covered important steps for a trainee nurse to remember when on a night shift.

“Be alert. Don’t think because all the residents are asleep you can sleep too. Find work to do. Don’t rush to finish all your work so you can sit down and relax while everybody sleeps. You need to stay alert.”

Gary didn’t fall asleep. He was paying half-attention when the head nurse was talking about dentures. What he missed was, “Wash every single resident’s dentures, if they have them, separately. Then place them back by the bed.”

Sixteen of the residents depended on dentures for teeth. Sixteen of these found themselves in the same basin, gleaming brightly under Gary’s ministrations. He was intent on scoring another A. Then, shortly after midnight, his troubles began when he discovered, with alarm, that dentures do not carry identification. A highly concentrated bout of guess work ensued, mixed with failing insight.

After Mrs P smiled oddly at the Registered Nurse the following morning and said something incomprehensible, Gary was summoned to the office.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.