Sign Of The Times
Hello World,
These are heady days indeed in the local area, as the weather continues to be more spring-like than what usually passes for actual spring in these parts, and which technically doesn't arrive for another two weeks yet. But you can't tell by our yard, where the jaunty crocus have been putting on a show since last month, and now even the perky jonquils have popped open, and don't bother to tell them it's way too early. Down south, fans of the national pastime know that spring training games have started in earnest, and it goes without saying that seeing young men in sunny climes tossing around the old horsehide is a tonic for what ails you, although it must be said that this is much more therapeutic a remedy when the temperatures up here are in single digits all week, and everything is covered with snow, believe me. On an even more local level, Bill and I celebrated 29 years of wedded bliss last week, with all the presents anyone could hope for, besides a candlelit dinner - which is not usually how we enjoy our pizza, I can tell you that. Rounding out the week is the dreaded return of the confounded horologic tomfoolery of Daylight Saving Time, where the plan is to Spring Ahead, or show up late everywhere on Sunday. The very idea of taking away an hour from chocolate-deprived grouchy Christians getting to church at the wrong time, well, that's what I call a recipe for disaster on an epic scale. I'll have mine with chocolate, if you please.
At the hospital where I work, for ages upon ages, there was a large sign on the top of the main building that one of the employees had fabricated out of metal pipes which had been bent into shape to spell NOEL in bright lights for the holiday season, and could be seen for miles in every direction. Then a few years ago, this timeless message was deemed too politically incorrect to display to the wide world, so they sent the crack Engineering team up to the roof to perform the necessary remediation, and make the public safe from such a blatantly partisan greeting emanating from the hospital's peak. In a manner that would tax my spatial geometry challenged brain cells (both of them, which I have renamed Pythagoras and Euclid for the occasion) they re-configured the pipes in such a way, so that what used to be NOEL was transformed into PEACE instead, and I think we can all agree, long may it wave. Now, I'm not usually out driving at night, but yesterday I was going to a meeting at church after dinner, and couldn't help but notice that the sign atop the hospital was still lit up, even though it's a lot closer to Easter than to Christmas at this point. It seems that the censors had the last laugh after all, because as I drove past, it became apparent that what the sign says now is EACE, which I'm thinking, must really make people wonder far and wide, and I can't say that I blame them one bit. Not to mention Pythagoras and Euclid, who cannot be relied on for any ponderous cogitation, and are all too easily confused. And if The Wise Men of lore and legend had been looking for a sign to follow, and it was this one, they certainly never would have found their way to Bethlehem in the first place, and we'd all still be Druids to this day, by golly.
Speaking of work, for years we kept a file cabinet of maintenance files, for our service agreements and contracts, separate from all of the one-time orders in our regular files. People would call and ask for something, and we would promptly go right to it and pick it up instantly with no trouble at all. Then the consultants came, and brought along their own contract specialist, which you would think would make things better - or at least you would think that if you had no experience with consultants previously. I should point out that in our department, we've been there over 150 years between the four of us, and the consultants have been there for 6 months, and yet they decided to chuck our filing system and replace it with one of their own making, like that would be any kind of improvement. To the surprise of no one, what actually happened was that they managed to totally mess up all of our files, so that now it takes 2 people 20 minutes to look through 6 file cabinets in 4 different offices, and you still can't find what you're looking for, and thanks ever so much not. When this happened once again earlier in the week, the contract specialist came back to me later with the errant paperwork, and apologized because he said he had put it in a drawer, but the files were not in alphabetic order, which is why he hadn't found it the first time he looked. Of course, everyone knows that I'm too polite to laugh, or to criticize, and I ruthlessly bit back the retort that sprang to my lips, which was to ask him: "And what order were you thinking of filing them, if not alphabetically - putting them in order by size?" I'm telling you, you just can't make this stuff up.
And while we're on the subject of making things up, it reminds me of when I went to the dentist recently with my bum tooth, although I am not using that affliction as an excuse by any means. When I first went in for my appointment, I was given a clipboard full of forms to fill out, and I had gotten there nice and early for just this purpose, because there's always paperwork beforehand, and I didn't want it to slow things down, especially since I was in so much pain. I filled out the personal and medical information that it asked for, and the questionnaire about allergies and other health concerns that were unrelated to my current complaint. The last page was a Consent form, that I needed to check off and initial each section, saying that the procedure had been explained to me and I understood it, including the surgical options, details about anesthesia, post-operative care, and medications that might be used. As I said, I was given this clipboard full of forms to fill out, and nobody said to fill out some of them and leave the last one blank, so in the interests of speed, I just went ahead and checked and initialed each section of the Consent form, even though I hadn't seen the dentist yet, and nothing had been explained to me so far. When I got into the treatment room with the dentist, he reviewed all of the forms, and he made a sort of rueful chuckle when he pointed out that I had already completed the last form, when the two of us had never set eyes on each other until that very moment - which he pointed out, entirely defeated the purpose of calling it an Informed Consent form in the first place. "Oh," I replied breezily, "I work at the hospital, and we're always signing forms that we don't understand. We call that 'UN-Informed Consent'." He laughed.
Also at work last week, even though it was before the semi-annual chronological donnybrook of Daylight Saving Time, there were apparently other time challenges that turned out to be too much for the staff to handle. I sent an email to the Laboratory Director, only to receive back this startling Away notice in return -
========================
I will be out of the office on Tuesday February 21st
and Wednesday February 22nd
========================
I'm sorry, please step out of the booth, and thank you for playing our game. No, you most certainly "WILL" not be anything on those two dates in February, which had long since passed by March 6, when this message was sent to me - unless once again, either you were planning to take your Way-Back Machine there, or perhaps the intended target dates were supposed to be in 2013 instead, which makes even less sense. Going in the opposite direction in Accounts Payable, they forwarded to me an invoice that needed to be straightened out, but frankly, I found its biggest problem was their own time-and-date stamp at the top:
====================
RECEIVED
South Shore Med Ctr
FINANCE DEPT
2012 MAY - 5 10:44 AM
=====================
Now it was MY turn in the Way-Back Machine, since I received this invoice on March 5, or two whole months before it ever reached Finance in the first place. It certainly was some confusing times at the employer of last resort lately, and they can't all be laid at my doorstep, not by a long shot. One can only hope that things will improve once we Spring Ahead to the other side of this nefarious vernal time warp, although if that actually worked, you can believe me when I say that I personally would eat my hat, and devil take the hind-most. But now in the spirit of brotherhood and good will to all, I have asked Pythagoras and Euclid to leave you with this immortal benediction that passeth understanding -
EACE
These are heady days indeed in the local area, as the weather continues to be more spring-like than what usually passes for actual spring in these parts, and which technically doesn't arrive for another two weeks yet. But you can't tell by our yard, where the jaunty crocus have been putting on a show since last month, and now even the perky jonquils have popped open, and don't bother to tell them it's way too early. Down south, fans of the national pastime know that spring training games have started in earnest, and it goes without saying that seeing young men in sunny climes tossing around the old horsehide is a tonic for what ails you, although it must be said that this is much more therapeutic a remedy when the temperatures up here are in single digits all week, and everything is covered with snow, believe me. On an even more local level, Bill and I celebrated 29 years of wedded bliss last week, with all the presents anyone could hope for, besides a candlelit dinner - which is not usually how we enjoy our pizza, I can tell you that. Rounding out the week is the dreaded return of the confounded horologic tomfoolery of Daylight Saving Time, where the plan is to Spring Ahead, or show up late everywhere on Sunday. The very idea of taking away an hour from chocolate-deprived grouchy Christians getting to church at the wrong time, well, that's what I call a recipe for disaster on an epic scale. I'll have mine with chocolate, if you please.
At the hospital where I work, for ages upon ages, there was a large sign on the top of the main building that one of the employees had fabricated out of metal pipes which had been bent into shape to spell NOEL in bright lights for the holiday season, and could be seen for miles in every direction. Then a few years ago, this timeless message was deemed too politically incorrect to display to the wide world, so they sent the crack Engineering team up to the roof to perform the necessary remediation, and make the public safe from such a blatantly partisan greeting emanating from the hospital's peak. In a manner that would tax my spatial geometry challenged brain cells (both of them, which I have renamed Pythagoras and Euclid for the occasion) they re-configured the pipes in such a way, so that what used to be NOEL was transformed into PEACE instead, and I think we can all agree, long may it wave. Now, I'm not usually out driving at night, but yesterday I was going to a meeting at church after dinner, and couldn't help but notice that the sign atop the hospital was still lit up, even though it's a lot closer to Easter than to Christmas at this point. It seems that the censors had the last laugh after all, because as I drove past, it became apparent that what the sign says now is EACE, which I'm thinking, must really make people wonder far and wide, and I can't say that I blame them one bit. Not to mention Pythagoras and Euclid, who cannot be relied on for any ponderous cogitation, and are all too easily confused. And if The Wise Men of lore and legend had been looking for a sign to follow, and it was this one, they certainly never would have found their way to Bethlehem in the first place, and we'd all still be Druids to this day, by golly.
Speaking of work, for years we kept a file cabinet of maintenance files, for our service agreements and contracts, separate from all of the one-time orders in our regular files. People would call and ask for something, and we would promptly go right to it and pick it up instantly with no trouble at all. Then the consultants came, and brought along their own contract specialist, which you would think would make things better - or at least you would think that if you had no experience with consultants previously. I should point out that in our department, we've been there over 150 years between the four of us, and the consultants have been there for 6 months, and yet they decided to chuck our filing system and replace it with one of their own making, like that would be any kind of improvement. To the surprise of no one, what actually happened was that they managed to totally mess up all of our files, so that now it takes 2 people 20 minutes to look through 6 file cabinets in 4 different offices, and you still can't find what you're looking for, and thanks ever so much not. When this happened once again earlier in the week, the contract specialist came back to me later with the errant paperwork, and apologized because he said he had put it in a drawer, but the files were not in alphabetic order, which is why he hadn't found it the first time he looked. Of course, everyone knows that I'm too polite to laugh, or to criticize, and I ruthlessly bit back the retort that sprang to my lips, which was to ask him: "And what order were you thinking of filing them, if not alphabetically - putting them in order by size?" I'm telling you, you just can't make this stuff up.
And while we're on the subject of making things up, it reminds me of when I went to the dentist recently with my bum tooth, although I am not using that affliction as an excuse by any means. When I first went in for my appointment, I was given a clipboard full of forms to fill out, and I had gotten there nice and early for just this purpose, because there's always paperwork beforehand, and I didn't want it to slow things down, especially since I was in so much pain. I filled out the personal and medical information that it asked for, and the questionnaire about allergies and other health concerns that were unrelated to my current complaint. The last page was a Consent form, that I needed to check off and initial each section, saying that the procedure had been explained to me and I understood it, including the surgical options, details about anesthesia, post-operative care, and medications that might be used. As I said, I was given this clipboard full of forms to fill out, and nobody said to fill out some of them and leave the last one blank, so in the interests of speed, I just went ahead and checked and initialed each section of the Consent form, even though I hadn't seen the dentist yet, and nothing had been explained to me so far. When I got into the treatment room with the dentist, he reviewed all of the forms, and he made a sort of rueful chuckle when he pointed out that I had already completed the last form, when the two of us had never set eyes on each other until that very moment - which he pointed out, entirely defeated the purpose of calling it an Informed Consent form in the first place. "Oh," I replied breezily, "I work at the hospital, and we're always signing forms that we don't understand. We call that 'UN-Informed Consent'." He laughed.
Also at work last week, even though it was before the semi-annual chronological donnybrook of Daylight Saving Time, there were apparently other time challenges that turned out to be too much for the staff to handle. I sent an email to the Laboratory Director, only to receive back this startling Away notice in return -
========================
I will be out of the office on Tuesday February 21st
and Wednesday February 22nd
========================
I'm sorry, please step out of the booth, and thank you for playing our game. No, you most certainly "WILL" not be anything on those two dates in February, which had long since passed by March 6, when this message was sent to me - unless once again, either you were planning to take your Way-Back Machine there, or perhaps the intended target dates were supposed to be in 2013 instead, which makes even less sense. Going in the opposite direction in Accounts Payable, they forwarded to me an invoice that needed to be straightened out, but frankly, I found its biggest problem was their own time-and-date stamp at the top:
====================
RECEIVED
South Shore Med Ctr
FINANCE DEPT
2012 MAY - 5 10:44 AM
=====================
Now it was MY turn in the Way-Back Machine, since I received this invoice on March 5, or two whole months before it ever reached Finance in the first place. It certainly was some confusing times at the employer of last resort lately, and they can't all be laid at my doorstep, not by a long shot. One can only hope that things will improve once we Spring Ahead to the other side of this nefarious vernal time warp, although if that actually worked, you can believe me when I say that I personally would eat my hat, and devil take the hind-most. But now in the spirit of brotherhood and good will to all, I have asked Pythagoras and Euclid to leave you with this immortal benediction that passeth understanding -
EACE
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 10:39 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home