Drawing on a year of fieldwork in Heartland Community, a "culture-change" nonprofit nursing home, this article investigates dynamics of worker-client power relationships across departments. The analysis raises questions about power and inequality that invert the usual way of thinking about it: Rather than trying to explain why some workers or customers are treated better or worse than others, this article explores why the same people were treated very differently at different times of the day by staff in different departments of the same organization. The divergence in power relations across departments, I contend, flowed from the nursing home’s attempts to manage cross-cutting pressures to humanize care relationships without increasing costs. I suggest that that Heartland’s "solution" to these tensions preserves the routinely inhumane treatment of nursing home residents in the day-to-day activities of the nursing department while presenting a much different face to visitors, family members, policy makers, and the public. The article concludes by suggesting that these ethnographic findings may point not only to a widespread strategy in the nursing home industry but also more generally to the organizational impression management functions served by efforts to "humanize" worker-client relationships.