Raising The Bar
Hello World,
Well, for those of us here in the mythical confines of Mudville, who were hoping that the Mets would beat the Cardinals in the playoffs, these are dark days indeed. Just like in the fabled poem, Mighty Casey has indeed struck out, and by next week, there will be only one team whose fans do not have the anguished cry of "wait until next year!" upon their lips. Considering that the media bigwigs can't stand it when there are two small market teams in the World Series, because people don't watch the games and the ad revenues are less, you would think they would have done more to keep the Yankees, Mets, Dodgers and Angels in the playoffs, if only for their own self-interest. After all, what's the sense of being a diabolical greedy media ogre with no soul, if you can't even keep St. Louis and Detroit out of the Fall Classic? These ogres we have nowadays are just not all they're cracked up to be, and that's all there is to that.
Speaking of sports, people can call me what they like (don't you dare!) but I may as well say right up front that I don't hold with this idea of young women on the football sidelines doing feature-ettes as if they care about the game. The first time it happened in the 1970's, it was considered radical, and that would be reason enough to do something different. But now that every single telecast has to have one, it has become nothing more than another boring example of the networks patronizing half of their audience while pandering to the other half. I was reminded of this today when I happened to pass by a radio tuned to WBLS, which is the station of choice for urban youth, and there was a young lady reading a story about some award that had been bestowed on Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb, which she gushed, he had won by receiving over 7,000 votes, no doubt by an adoring public. She wrapped up her report with this classic ad lib: "Go Phillies!"
Oh all right, for the sake of the KGB agents monitoring my email, Donovan McNabb does not play quarterback for the Phillies, although that might not be such a bad idea, all things considered. I'll bet the diabolical greedy media ogres never thought of that one either.
It may have been that same day when I was driving to work and as I went under the train trestle, I noticed a train passing overhead that was not the usual commuter trains that service our fair city, but something with a noticeably different design on the locomotive. Then I realized that it was one of the new Amtrak Acela trains that are supposed to use some sort of advanced technology to make them faster than anything else on tracks, speeding their passengers between Boston and Washington, D.C. in a twinkling, compared to more outmoded forms of transportation. Luckily, the train was moving so slowly that I had plenty of time to identify its logo, although that would seem to defeat the purpose of having a high-speed train in the first place.
Also on the subject of defeating the purpose, last week I got a call from Leonard in EKG, who requested a service call on their copier because it wasn't working. Our service people require more information than that, so I asked Leonard what happens when they press the copy button, and he said the machine makes a copy, but it comes out completely blank. Oh, I told him, that was part of our new cost-saving measures to save on ink. He laughed.
While we're on the topic of copiers, today I came back from lunch and found a message in my voice mail from Rita in the Dispatch office of our copier vendor. She asked me to call her back, so I did, and then she proceeded to put me on hold for 8 minutes, which I could tell because our telephones at work have a display panel that says how long the call is. Mind you, please bear in mind that she was the one who called me in the first place, I hadn't called her. In any event, when she came back, she apologized for keeping me waiting, because as she put it, she had been speaking with a customer. Excuse me??? I felt like saying, and what am I, chopped liver?! Thanks so very much not!
Incredibly enough, that wasn't my only "Rodney Dangerfield" moment at work this week. (And how we do all miss dear Rodney, and his wonderful "I don't get no respect, no respect at all!" routines.) I had been unable to the attend the HAZMAT meeting in June, due to being clinically insane at the time, and left the rest of the committee to carry on their important work with hazardous materials in my absence. Actually, I am the person who sends out the HAZMAT update forms, and in fact, I was particularly asked to attend the meetings when everyone on the original committee left, and none of the new people knew what they were supposed to do. So you can imagine my surprise when I received the minutes of the June meeting, and found, or rather did NOT find, myself listed as either Present or Not Present in the attendance section. You can believe that I called the chairman and complained, especially since he obviously had a sticker already addressed to me for inter-office mail, and yet still failed to include me in the membership, even though I had been there since before the beginning. Talk about "what have you done for us lately" and then some. After that, I was speaking to one of our clinical supervisors, who thanked me for a payroll report that I had compiled for her, and she said she wished that she could get the same thing from the Nursing department for her other employees, but we both knew that would never happen. I said, "I'm the only idiot who does that," to which she replied, "I know." Hey! With friends like this, who needs enemies, right?
Speaking of the wonderful world of healthcare, I had another co-worker come into my office this week and complain about some perceived injustice that he had endured at the hands of outrageous fortune, and he was in a fine state of high dudgeon about it. He was describing to me how he told off the offending party in no uncertain terms and pulling no punches. "And you know me," he fumed, "I hold no bars." I found that a curious new twist on an age-old wrestling idiom of "no holds barred," which manages to be succinct and incomprehensible all at the same time.
Another incomprehensible twist comes to us courtesy of a new book called "The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived," by Allan Lazar, Dan Karlan and Jeremy Salter, which they claim explains "How characters of myth, legends, television, and movies have shaped our society, changed our behavior, and set the course of history." Please feel free to visit their website at http://www.101influential.com/ and see for yourself. Now personally, I have no problem with people writing a book like this, and in fact, I hold no bars, as the saying goes. (No, it doesn't!) But the funny thing was, I found myself taking exception to their rankings, and arguing the superior merits of James Bond (#51) compared to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (#44) or decrying the outrage of The Ugly Duckling (#55) coming in ahead of Batman (#60) as if they really were actual people who deserved to have their integrity defended. I won't spoil the ending for any mystery fans out there who want to be surprised at the choice for number one, but let me just say that no less a personage than the jolly old elf himself, Santa Claus, came sledding in at #4, so you can see at a glance that this was one tough competition. If you don't believe me, just ask poor Luke Skywalker, hailing in from a far far away and long long ago #85. Luke, I am your Barbie.
Meanwhile, our friends at Minntech Renal Systems wanted to notify their customers about their holiday hours in November and December, and they provided us with a handy reference card with a calendar of dates to show the days they would be closed for the holidays, and when to place orders to receive by a certain time. I glanced at it before filing, and couldn't figure out what seemed wrong about it, until I noticed that the dates didn't appear to follow in consecutive order, as they do on regular calendars. That was the first I realized that this handy calendar included only five days, so that you would see one week end on the 17th and the next week would begin on the 20th, or it would skip from the first to the fourth, for example. I suppose they did that to better highlight the days in question, but it certainly threw me for a loop, since I was expecting it to look and behave just like a regular calendar, not some screwy "Readers Digest Condensed Version" with only five days. Of course, everyone knows what I think about those short weeks, and this is my idea of just taking it to a whole new, and I don't mind saying unwelcome, extreme. On the other hand, if the folks with the 101 most influential mythical characters did that, and left out two numbers out of every seven, it would really help Luke Skywalker. And everyone knows that I am nothing if not helpful, because after all, I hold no bars.
Well, for those of us here in the mythical confines of Mudville, who were hoping that the Mets would beat the Cardinals in the playoffs, these are dark days indeed. Just like in the fabled poem, Mighty Casey has indeed struck out, and by next week, there will be only one team whose fans do not have the anguished cry of "wait until next year!" upon their lips. Considering that the media bigwigs can't stand it when there are two small market teams in the World Series, because people don't watch the games and the ad revenues are less, you would think they would have done more to keep the Yankees, Mets, Dodgers and Angels in the playoffs, if only for their own self-interest. After all, what's the sense of being a diabolical greedy media ogre with no soul, if you can't even keep St. Louis and Detroit out of the Fall Classic? These ogres we have nowadays are just not all they're cracked up to be, and that's all there is to that.
Speaking of sports, people can call me what they like (don't you dare!) but I may as well say right up front that I don't hold with this idea of young women on the football sidelines doing feature-ettes as if they care about the game. The first time it happened in the 1970's, it was considered radical, and that would be reason enough to do something different. But now that every single telecast has to have one, it has become nothing more than another boring example of the networks patronizing half of their audience while pandering to the other half. I was reminded of this today when I happened to pass by a radio tuned to WBLS, which is the station of choice for urban youth, and there was a young lady reading a story about some award that had been bestowed on Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb, which she gushed, he had won by receiving over 7,000 votes, no doubt by an adoring public. She wrapped up her report with this classic ad lib: "Go Phillies!"
Oh all right, for the sake of the KGB agents monitoring my email, Donovan McNabb does not play quarterback for the Phillies, although that might not be such a bad idea, all things considered. I'll bet the diabolical greedy media ogres never thought of that one either.
It may have been that same day when I was driving to work and as I went under the train trestle, I noticed a train passing overhead that was not the usual commuter trains that service our fair city, but something with a noticeably different design on the locomotive. Then I realized that it was one of the new Amtrak Acela trains that are supposed to use some sort of advanced technology to make them faster than anything else on tracks, speeding their passengers between Boston and Washington, D.C. in a twinkling, compared to more outmoded forms of transportation. Luckily, the train was moving so slowly that I had plenty of time to identify its logo, although that would seem to defeat the purpose of having a high-speed train in the first place.
Also on the subject of defeating the purpose, last week I got a call from Leonard in EKG, who requested a service call on their copier because it wasn't working. Our service people require more information than that, so I asked Leonard what happens when they press the copy button, and he said the machine makes a copy, but it comes out completely blank. Oh, I told him, that was part of our new cost-saving measures to save on ink. He laughed.
While we're on the topic of copiers, today I came back from lunch and found a message in my voice mail from Rita in the Dispatch office of our copier vendor. She asked me to call her back, so I did, and then she proceeded to put me on hold for 8 minutes, which I could tell because our telephones at work have a display panel that says how long the call is. Mind you, please bear in mind that she was the one who called me in the first place, I hadn't called her. In any event, when she came back, she apologized for keeping me waiting, because as she put it, she had been speaking with a customer. Excuse me??? I felt like saying, and what am I, chopped liver?! Thanks so very much not!
Incredibly enough, that wasn't my only "Rodney Dangerfield" moment at work this week. (And how we do all miss dear Rodney, and his wonderful "I don't get no respect, no respect at all!" routines.) I had been unable to the attend the HAZMAT meeting in June, due to being clinically insane at the time, and left the rest of the committee to carry on their important work with hazardous materials in my absence. Actually, I am the person who sends out the HAZMAT update forms, and in fact, I was particularly asked to attend the meetings when everyone on the original committee left, and none of the new people knew what they were supposed to do. So you can imagine my surprise when I received the minutes of the June meeting, and found, or rather did NOT find, myself listed as either Present or Not Present in the attendance section. You can believe that I called the chairman and complained, especially since he obviously had a sticker already addressed to me for inter-office mail, and yet still failed to include me in the membership, even though I had been there since before the beginning. Talk about "what have you done for us lately" and then some. After that, I was speaking to one of our clinical supervisors, who thanked me for a payroll report that I had compiled for her, and she said she wished that she could get the same thing from the Nursing department for her other employees, but we both knew that would never happen. I said, "I'm the only idiot who does that," to which she replied, "I know." Hey! With friends like this, who needs enemies, right?
Speaking of the wonderful world of healthcare, I had another co-worker come into my office this week and complain about some perceived injustice that he had endured at the hands of outrageous fortune, and he was in a fine state of high dudgeon about it. He was describing to me how he told off the offending party in no uncertain terms and pulling no punches. "And you know me," he fumed, "I hold no bars." I found that a curious new twist on an age-old wrestling idiom of "no holds barred," which manages to be succinct and incomprehensible all at the same time.
Another incomprehensible twist comes to us courtesy of a new book called "The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived," by Allan Lazar, Dan Karlan and Jeremy Salter, which they claim explains "How characters of myth, legends, television, and movies have shaped our society, changed our behavior, and set the course of history." Please feel free to visit their website at http://www.101influential.com/ and see for yourself. Now personally, I have no problem with people writing a book like this, and in fact, I hold no bars, as the saying goes. (No, it doesn't!) But the funny thing was, I found myself taking exception to their rankings, and arguing the superior merits of James Bond (#51) compared to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (#44) or decrying the outrage of The Ugly Duckling (#55) coming in ahead of Batman (#60) as if they really were actual people who deserved to have their integrity defended. I won't spoil the ending for any mystery fans out there who want to be surprised at the choice for number one, but let me just say that no less a personage than the jolly old elf himself, Santa Claus, came sledding in at #4, so you can see at a glance that this was one tough competition. If you don't believe me, just ask poor Luke Skywalker, hailing in from a far far away and long long ago #85. Luke, I am your Barbie.
Meanwhile, our friends at Minntech Renal Systems wanted to notify their customers about their holiday hours in November and December, and they provided us with a handy reference card with a calendar of dates to show the days they would be closed for the holidays, and when to place orders to receive by a certain time. I glanced at it before filing, and couldn't figure out what seemed wrong about it, until I noticed that the dates didn't appear to follow in consecutive order, as they do on regular calendars. That was the first I realized that this handy calendar included only five days, so that you would see one week end on the 17th and the next week would begin on the 20th, or it would skip from the first to the fourth, for example. I suppose they did that to better highlight the days in question, but it certainly threw me for a loop, since I was expecting it to look and behave just like a regular calendar, not some screwy "Readers Digest Condensed Version" with only five days. Of course, everyone knows what I think about those short weeks, and this is my idea of just taking it to a whole new, and I don't mind saying unwelcome, extreme. On the other hand, if the folks with the 101 most influential mythical characters did that, and left out two numbers out of every seven, it would really help Luke Skywalker. And everyone knows that I am nothing if not helpful, because after all, I hold no bars.
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 8:38 PM
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