Today I am volunteering at an outpatient addiction treatment clinic in Baltimore, in what my Uber driver warns me is “a very dangerous neighborhood.”
It’s a cold Saturday morning in February, and I’ve traveled about an hour from Washington, D.C., where I live. I’m here to share some business management methods and operational tools with the team, based on a class I teach at Georgetown and my job as a management consultant.
The driver drops me off in the parking lot, and as I walk toward the entrance, I see an armed guard at the door. I walk past him into a large open waiting room, which is bright and clean. The right wall is lined with staff sitting behind glass partitions like bank tellers, but big, heavy-looking curtains hang from the ceiling at each window.
I check in and have a seat against the back wall. I try not to stare, but I’m curious about the curtains. I look around at patients coming and going.
A young woman enters the clinic and has the skinniest legs I’ve ever seen, like two drawing pencils in colorful, patterned leggings. She rushes down a hallway like she’s late for something, and I wonder where she’s going.
