Shopping Penguin

So cute, what with his Pengu backpack!

Too Old

Maybe I’m just having an “off” day, but I think I’ve come to the realization that even at 21, I’m too old to go back to school. I’ve missed the boat, whatever I might have been -probably won’t ever happen. So.. I should just get comfortable in my dead end job, stop dreaming of something better because every teacher, every counselor that ever spoke to me were right: I will end up no where. No matter what.

-sigh-

Five Seconds

Still Sick

Still sick – yep. Thursday, been sick since Tuesday.
I think today is the worst day so far. My ears are plugged, nose is plugged, chest is wheezy and and I’m coughing up phlegm. I really, really, really don’t want to go into work today. I went in yesterday despite being sick and stuck it out for the whole shift. But today I just don’t want to go in. Unfortunately, I know I should. I have a Q&A to do today and while I personally don’t care about it’s results since they shaft me every time, I should make an effort. Maybe I’ll just stay for that and leave.

I’m sure waiting out in the below freezing temperatures last night for 40 minutes waiting for one bus and then for another 30 minutes waiting for another and then 15 minutes walking home didn’t help much either. We got dumped on with snow, 2 ft or so in my area, plus 6 inches of ice on the road. Thankfully most people along the street I walk down shovel their driveways AND the length of sidewalk in front of their house so it makes it much easier for those of us who don’t drive.

And landlords are fighting again – yay! I always love listening to them yelling at each other in Punjabi. Makes my heart swell.

I think I’ll go back to bed now.

Home

Well, I was hacking up a lung when Dr. Ooh La La was in the office asking for a coworker to help him find an old dictation to see if it was typed and he stopped talking, looked over at me and went “You need to go home. You’re sick”. In between coughs I went “ya think?” then laughed. Thankfully he has a sense of humor and so he laughed as well.

I stayed until 6 pm though before saying screw it and leaving.
I’m actually starting to think its bronchitis, so if I’m still coughing and wheezing tomorrow I’m going to the doctor. I have 24.7 hours of sick time to take so theoretically I could take the rest of the week off but then I’d have no more sick time for a while.

Either way – I’m home. I’m sick.
Yay.

Cheat, Kimchi, Piss

So tonight while on my break instead of going out for a smoke (yes I started again, old news), I was playing around with my Rubik’s cube. Call me a masochist but I bought the damn thing and messed it up and now enjoy getting my ass royally kicked by trying to solve it. Tonight I was getting particularly frustrated with the thing and so began to carefully peel away all of the little colorful stickers and place them on the desk. It was like a rainbow of square stickers all around me. I was totally immersed in what I was doing when out of no where this man’s voice goes “You do realize that’s cheating, right?”. I look up slowly, my tongue still sticking out (I do that when I’m concentrating) and there before me is Dr. Orthopod casually leaning against the separator surrounding my work space, a cocky grin spreading over his face.

Me? I just grinned cheekily and calmly told him “well yea, but that’s the whole point of these things. They frustrate you long enough that cheating is the only solution.” He laughed, handed me a report to be edited and left; grinning the whole way.

Tonight seemed to be a good night for funny stuff, even though Marlene my coworker laid into me again about not getting any echocardiogram reports to which I made her come over to my desk and showed her that I can do as many reports as I want and the echoes don’t come to me.

The phone rang while she was out of the office and so I picked it up.

“Transcription, Super Steno Girl speaking” was met with the deep baritone voice of Dr. Ooh La La (my favorite – FAVORITE doctor).

“Hi this is Dr. Ooh La La and I just saw this chap in the Emergency Department and was wondering if you could do this report stat?”

“Sure, do you have the hospital number?”

After the pleasantries were exchanged and I received the number I mentioned “oh I’m still working on the report for Mrs. Generic Patient”

He responds as “Yes, we seem to be having a lot of Korean chefs come in tonight”

Me: “Oh yea?”

Him: “Yea, it must be all the kimchi they eat.”

Me: Silence…..”Nah, probably just the steam.”

Funny event #3 – I was doing a consult report from this one specialist who was seeing a patient in the ER and the Dr. says:

“No history of drug use the patient was cleaning a “meth house” a month ago that was filthy and covered in cat piss”

Piss – can I type that? Can I put that in the report?
I had to back it up a few times to hear it and sure enough – the doctor said it. Piss.
Can I replace it with urine?
Or with pee?
Nope – verbatim. Must type verbatim. So, it’s on the record as “piss”.

Humorous #4 was listening to the dictation and hearing the Cardiologist go “Hi this is Dr. Speedy doing echoes on August 7, wait what am I saying – January 7, I wish it were August 7..he he he”. And an ER doc doing “the patient will be sent to Dr. So and So bracket cardiology end bracket, Dr. ABC bracket neurology bracket, Dr. 123 from bracket..wait.. what am I doing? Uh, yea you can… forget about the brackets or.. leave them in.. uhm.. whatever, I really don’t care. Be creative. Uh.. yea like whatever you want I guess. Anyways, carrying on so I don’t bore you. (too late)”.

Creative?
Can I send you the report printed on pink paper with happy stickers all over it?
That would be creative, wouldn’t it?
Please?

I have a “progress review” tomorrow with the boss at 3:45 (I think – I hope) wish me luck that I don’t get fired!

Great Googly Moogly Batman!

Well it’s not 10:13 pm and I -just- got on the internet. It’s been down all night – you can imagine how horrible that has been for me, what with being at work and having limited resources to search for things under. For the past 7 hours my desk has been a battlefield of dictionaries, surgical books, anatomy books, medical spellers, drug binders, pharmacological dictionaries and papers to try and help me through my reports. You really don’t appreciate Google until you don’t have it anymore! It’s so hard to look for something when you can barely spell it (and the spellcheckers on this computer and deplorable). It’s much easier to go to Google and give it your best effort and be rewarded. Without it, you’re stuck searching.

I did manage to get over 1 hour 20 minutes, which is 10 minutes over what I’m supposed to do. The last report was 28 minutes long. A very long, very boring orthopedic surgery on some patients broken back. Although I will say that looking at the CT scans and x-rays was AMAZING – I found the break without using the aid of the lil green arrow that they had on another slide; and it wasn’t a big obvious break either. Just an intrusion into the spinal canal or..whatever. Anyways, point being it looked neat; though admittedly probably doesn’t FEEL that way for the patient.

Unfortunately there were many blanks I had to leave for my lead hand because, as mentioned above, NO GOOGLE! I was so distraught for the whole night and of course, as soon as I sign off the operative report BOOM the internet works. *Grumble*. Now I’m trying to decide if I should a) go for a smoke or b) try to look up some of the missed words on Google.

Maybe I’ll do B and then A.. work backwards. Why not?

On a side note, I have a splitting headache, like – splitting. Enough it’s making me nauseous. Yuck. Food maybe.. yea that might help.

Cheers!

Study Back

So cute – both the guys and the song

Office Politics

Character List:
Marlene: Nearly retired lady that I work with at night. She’s there between 4 pm and midnight; though 90% of the time doesn’t roll in until about 5.
Linda: Middle-aged lady that I also work with at night though she is casual. Very opinionated with a “know it all” attitude.
Hilda: Middle-aged lady that works day shift 9 am – 5 pm, I see her for about 2 hours a day between Monday and Thursday.
Carla: Middle-aged woman who works Sunday – Thursday 8 am – 4 pm. I see her for about an hour a day.
Sharla: Transcription Coordinator for all of our sites.

The Plot: I am the lowest person on the ‘totem pole’, so to speak, and so I am an easy target for office gossip.

The Story
(bear with me, it’s a tad long).
During the summer I was involved in a small media series put on by one of our newspapers and the main news channel for our area. Myself and 4 others competed in a “fitness” challenge over the course of 3 months. July 5 – October 5. The goal was to lose as much weight the right way as possible through good old fashioned exercise and proper diet control. This was encouraged by the personal trainers from a gym we all worked with 3 x a week for an hour each on top of one of the top dieticians in the area helping plan our meals and the like. We were scored on how many pounds we lost, how many inches we lost, our attitude in the gym, how many events (such as the Breast Cancer Walk) we entered, our daily food logs to the gym owner, and our weekly write ups in the paper. The winner at the end of the 3 month challenge won a trip for 2 for a week to a health resort/spa in Brazil; in case you were wondering – I was the one that won.

During these 3 months I had to take transit every second day into another city (which isn’t as odd as it sounds since transit here is all connected between three/four large cities) and then to work by 3 pm. The bus ride alone from the gym to the train station which would take me to work took about an hour; the train ride about 45 min – one hour. I scheduled all of my gym appointments for before noon so I could leave by about 12:30, after showering and all that, and be at work on time. Unfortunately, the bus route was/is under heavy reconstruction and so it was really hit or miss on how long the ride would actually take. Some days were better than others. Also, the train tended to be quite slow during the summer months and there were several problems. One incident was that instead of stopping at each station for 45 seconds, we were halted for 5 minutes thus making me over an hour late for work.

Around the end of July, the day before my first scheduled 30 minute massage (complimentary of the contest), Marlene got a hold of me (figuratively) just as I was leaving for the night. It was one of the days that I had been late due to transit issues. She went off on me and it sounded something like this:

Marlene: “You know, I don’t understand how you think it’s O.K for you to walk in here over an hour late for work. You do realize that many of the girls here are talking about it, a lot of them are angry that you’re always late and you never seem to make up the time? Who do you think you are showing up to work late? You could at least stay late and make up the time you know. There’s lots of them here that are really starting to complain, they’re sick and tired about what you’re doing.”

(Side note: Marlene is supposed to be at work at 4pm, yesterday she didn’t walk in until 8pm. Most days you’re lucky if she’s there by 5pm).

Since this was the first time Marlene had ever been like this towards me, I was rather stunned and my only response to her was “Let them talk, Sharla knows why I’m late and she’s not concerned by it at all. It’s none of their business.” Still angry I left and subsequently was irritated throughout the weekend. Sharla did know, in fact, and she was cool with my reasons for being late and took a lot of the time that I was late out of vacation days so I didn’t lose any pay over it.

Now, flash forward to tonight.

Marlene: “You know, you said earlier that you like when people say things to your face instead of going behind your back. So I have to say something and it’s more of a heads up and kind of a motivation for you to change but: There’s word going around that you’re going to be fired by the end of the month.”

Talk about dropping a bomb on my already bad day (I got yelled at by my landlady for the plugged toilet this morning).

Needless to say I was immediately defensive, as anyone would be in my situation.

Me: “And just who told you that?”

Marlene: “Oh I don’t remember and even if I did I wouldn’t tell you; it was told to me in confidence but it was told by a number of the girls. They’re tired of you sitting on the internet and assigning yourself easy dictations as soon as the boss (Laureen) leaves. And you know you do, you can’t deny that you are on the internet too much.” She’s right, I can’t deny that. It’s been a serious issue with me ever since I was about 12 and found out about the internet; I’m hooked. Like a junkie is to crack, so am I to the internet.

Me:”Excuse me?! I do not, ever, assign myself easy dictations as soon as Laureen leaves. Whoever told you that is flat out lying. The only thing I assign myself is at the end of a shift and I assign critical care reports like Oncology and Respiratory. Exactly like you taught me. Second of all, I don’t care what people are saying. Let them talk.”

Marlene: “Listen, I’m telling you this for your own good. I’m tired of it, Linda’s tired of it and many other girls are too. They look at you and all you do is sit on the internet. You don’t even make your quota. You piss around on the internet until 9 o’clock and then you’re rushing to get your work done and look stuff up and you’re constantly bugging Linda for help – enough is enough!”

Me: “I most certainly do, and if I don’t I’m only a few minutes away from it. Besides which, it’s not like you or Linda who has been here for eons, I’m still learning. Just yesterday I had a 15 minute vascular surgery report that took me near 3 hours to complete because a) the doctor was talking too fast and b) they were using equipment and procedures I’ve never heard of. And maybe if Linda was willing to help me when I initially needed the help, I wouldn’t be stuck leaving my blanks until the end of my shift and then rushing to try and fix them; or maybe if she and you mentored me like you’re supposed to be doing, I wouldn’t even need help!”

Marlene: “Ok alright so you may make your quota but what I’m saying is you’re on that internet too much and everyone is getting sick of it. They’re saying you’re going to be fired within the month and I’m just telling you. And another thing, you never to echoes (echocardiograms). The night before last Linda and I were stuck doing them all while you sat on reports; how come you never end up with echoes?”

Me: “Because they don’t come to me and I’ve been telling you that for 5 months when you brought this up the last time. And as for sitting on reports, I was working on 10 minutes of Dr. Marblemouth and their horrible rendition of a heart surgery. I wasn’t just “sitting” on them and not doing anything. Besides which, last night I took 20 of the 30 echoes that were there, even though I originally assigned myself all of them.”

Marlene: “I’m not talking about last night. I’m saying that even Linda was irritated the other night because you never seem to do any of the echoes…”

Me cutting her off: “Not true. All I did on day shift was echo after echo after echo; and of Dr. Speedy to boot! Honestly Marlene, they do not come to me and I don’t know why.”

Marlene: “Listen, whatever O.K? Just know that we’re all getting tired of you sitting on the internet, do you think that’s fair to everyone else who has to work for their quota and you come in here and assign yourself all the easy ones. Everyone knows that’s why you went to day shift, so you could be monitored.”

Me: “I do NOT assign myself the easy ones. I have not for a long, long time. Yes I know you caught me a few times in the summer but I learned and I do not do it anymore. And no, that’s not why I went to days Marlene” – the last part said terribly sweetly.

Marlene: “Why did you go to days then?”

Me: “I’m not going to tell you.”

By now I was yelling, not caring that there was a doctor in the dictation lounge or the health record girls next door being subjected to this battle. Surprisingly, I had managed to squelch the crying that had started at being bombarded by her again.

The argument continued for about 15 minutes with the same issues being repeated: That the rumor was going around that I am going to be fired by the end of the month. All I can say is that if the rumor is true, I have a very good idea on who started it: Hilda.

Two weeks ago when I had been an hour late for work I assigned myself at the end of my shift a 10 minute psychology report. She asked me, point blank, if I assigned it or if it came to me and instead of lying to her I told her the truth. She then flew off the handle and raved about how wrong it was and etcetera ad naseum. I told her that I did it because I needed the extra minutes, I was almost at my quota before I left; she said she didn’t care. She made me feel bad enough that I rejected the job and went home early.

Coincidentally I happen to have a meeting scheduled with Sharla on Tuesday for what she calls “Progress Review”.

The truth is I do have an issue with the internet. As I said I’ve had one since I was about 12, it’s been a curse all through high school “SuperStenoGirl is a bright child but she gets too distracted around the internet”, “SSG is a great student but I find around computers it’s easy for her to lose focus”. I know it’s been troublesome at work, I know that I rush to get work done when I realize how late it has gotten. My new years resolution is: Stay off the Internet as much as possible at work. So far, I’ve done a fairly decent job; today I was not on it at all until 5 pm and then it was to check my e-mail.

The worst thing about this is: Am I going to get fired? Now I have to wait until Tuesday, stressing over it, worrying over it, praying it won’t happen and hoping for the best. I used to think that stress didn’t effect you physically but I’m a complete convert now; ever since she told me this little rumor, my whole body has been tense. My stomach is in knots and I’ve thrown up a few times. Being fired may not seem entirely important to anyone else but to someone who was told over and over again by teachers and occasionally parents that I’d always fail at something, that I’d never be able to “make it” on my own, etc. the thought of being fired and thus “failing” is terrifying. Luckily though, my parents have my back this time. My dad has been helping me learn about all the ways to raise shit through the union; harassment, etc. and how to deal with coworkers like Marlene. It’s hard though since Marlene is usually my friend but she is a bitch. She is, afterall, the woman who swears and gets angry at doctors to their face, throws things and generally has a temper tantrum when things don’t go her own way.

So is she lying about this?
Or is it true: that there is a rumor going around. If so – what should I do about it?

I could worry myself sick being scared about it and all that, but what would that accomplish? Nothing.

I suppose in the end, if I’m fired I’m fired. I have options. I can look for another job, or I can move home (god help me) and go back to school.

I just hope I’m not fired though; I really hope I’m not fired. I’ll mention to Sharla though in our meeting, if it comes up, what my new years resolution is. Hopefully that will keep me in the good books.

Wish me luck.

Ohh yes please!

You are

What Rejected Crayon Are You?