I couldn't imagine ever joining this world again, given how my time had become so aimlessly filled, waiting for calls to come in on the pay phone or sitting in "community meetings," in which people made forlorn and implausible requests for light-dimmers and hole-punchers and exiting patients tearfully thanked everyone on the unit for their help.
Even for people whose requests for lights are denied, all is not lost.
An investigation that found pregnant women's requests for lighter jobs are refused, with devastating consequences.
The PDA was intended to put a stop to employers denying benefits to a mother-to-be or refusing her request for light duty, if the same would be granted to another worker who isn't pregnant.
The same reasoning is applied to X-rays that are frequently requested for light traumatic cases with low emergency degree.
Jeff Frayler, president of the Suffolk P.B.A., also said he knew of no male officer who had been refused a request for light-duty assignment because of an off-duty injury.
I get requests for "Italian lights" all the time - those are the strands of lights with bare bulbs hanging off of them that you see featured so frequently in garden wedding pictures.
Over the years, requests for traffic lights have ebbed and flowed, with a slight slowdown since Sept. 11, 2001.
Nabokov hopes that the general evades Soviet imprisonment, but the significance of the moment is tied to that serendipitous request for a light.
There are the subtlest hints of political dismay in glimpses of the casual corruption of the police, whether at a traffic stop, in a request for a light for a cigarette, or in a sexual attack on a woman — and, for that matter, in the casual anarchy of the story itself, a macabre series of mass killings that the authorities seem to have no awareness of and no ability to stop.
