A sign of badness

This is a sign of badness in a hospital - the lock from a code cart strewn on the ground in the middle of the hallway. The second code cart lock was on the floor ten feet down the hallway, meaning the code cart was probably moving in a hurry. For the uninitiated, the code cart is what we open when a patient is, in television ER terms, "crashing." Whether the patient's heart has stopped or going too fast, they aren't breathing, CPR is going on, etcetera, this cart rarely gets opened for nothing (mostly because some peon has to go through and itemize it afterwards, which is a pain).

The room in front of which this little lock lay was empty, which is not usually a problem in itself, but combined with this picture, it confirms badness happened there. This usually means that the patient got shipped to the ICU or CT scan or (sometimes) the morgue.

Most of what goes on in the hospital around you is white noise, but there a a few sounds, smells, sights, and 6th sense sensations that portend unmistakable badness, and the code cart lock on the floor is one of them.