What I say:

"You should contact your doctor, or if in your own judgment you think you need to be evaluated for an emergency, then you should come in."

What they hear:

"OMG RUSH IN NOW! NOW NOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOW!"

So today I got assaulted!

Really.

I was driving to work, only to discover some idiot blocking the road. Just stopped there yakking with some guy standing in the middle of the street. And yakking, and blocking, and yakking. I give 'em a honk to encourage them to MOVE. Of course neither of them do. The rest of the road clears up, I drive around... dude kicks my car.

So of course I try to find out if my car is damaged and who the hell this guy is so I can file charges. Chumpboy doesn't like that, and he and his friend decided to pile on.

I didn't fight back, and after a minute or so they were either satisfied or knew they were about to get busted hard, because they took off. I got the license plate of the chick they were with, then parked my car.

On the way back I found out that one of my friends from work had seen, if not the whole thing, much of it, and had called the cops. Between the five minutes it took me to park and walk back to where it happened, both the ambulance and the police had come and gone! (Holy crap, response time!) We did catch the police, though, and gave a full report.

I checked in (since, hey, I work in the ER!). I am medically cleared. Scrapes to the wrists and knees, a little cut on my cheek, a sore shoulder. I know I will feel worse later, but such is life. Right now I'm waiting for film for the camera, so I can get pictures of my injuries.

There is very little chance these monkeys will actually be caught. While I did get the license plate of the chick, every likelihood is that she will refuse to give any information about the event. Luckily, my ER visit is covered by my insurance (and my frickin' $80 copay will be covered by AFLAC, yay!). My car appears undamaged (though I didn't have MUCH chance to look at it). My pants are ruined; oops.

So there's MY great adventure for the day.

Yes, dear co-worker, when your quite literally *fat* ass repeatedly caused your cell phone to dial the ER, I called the police and reported a prank call. Regardless of what you claim, phones do not magically turn themselves on and dial themselves. If you leave your phone on and sit on it so your three-hundred-pound butt makes it dial our phone line repeatedly, it is not my job to painstakingly track down the phone number when I have five minutes left on my overnight shift. Nor does your brilliant advice of "you should have just hung up!" really apply, since your fat ass redialed the ER seven or eight times in the space of five minutes. You don't have to answer the phone, so your none-too-subtle accusations of lying just plain don't work on me, especially when the morning shift girl was sitting right here and can verify my every claim.

So go ahead and be pissed at me because I did my job and you're too goddamn stupid to work your cell phone. Guess what? Not my fault. You're an idiot. Deal with it.

Let's take a moment to talk about courtesy.

When a person works an overnight shift, that means they will be working 8 hours by themselves. They are responsible for every duty that a HUC must do. It is long, rough, and leaves that person tired.

That being the case, the courteous thing to do is allow that HUC to sit at the main desk at the time they come in, where they will be all night. Making whiny excuses and forcing that HUC to sit at the secondary desk, where they have to absorb the responsibility of ripping an extra fifty charts and have to completely log off every active program to move seats at 11pm is th ABSOLUTE HEIGHT of discourtesy.

No policy exists for this. I can't DEMAND that the bitch move. But I'm absolutely sick of being treated like shit by my coworkers. And I'll be damned if I ever give her the courtesy of moving for her, if our situations are reversed.

I hate people so fucking much.

Attention stupid lady:

The hospital is not a restaurant. We have a dietary services that prepare a reasonably wide variety of standardized trays. No matter how much you beg, plead, or demand, we cannot conjure a baked potato for your husband out of thin air. If you truly think we have no idea how to care for a sick person and you can do so much better, why did you bring him here?

Attention stupid people:

The restrictions on visiting (i.e. not before the doctor has seen the patient) is for the protection of their privacy, the quality of their medical care, and the overall safety and comfort of the patient. We won't tell you this, but we're also required to screen for such things as abuse, which logically won't be answered truthfully if the abuser is in the room. If we need your input to care for the patient, or you're nice, we will ask you to come back sooner. Beyond that, you are not special. Your loved one is a patient here, not you, and our policies exist for them, not you. This may shock and astound you, but we have seen patients in states of confusion or dementia before. We have some slight idea of how to take care of them. You also do not get a free pass back just because: you are family; you are loud; you really really want to come back; you have never heard the word 'no' before and are unfamiliar with it; you are crying (though I DO sympathize); you are worried; you threaten me; you throw a tantrum; etc.

Attention stupid people on the phone:

If you want patient information, please call them. The ER is not the operator.

If you have to ask how busy it is, you're not having an emergency.

No, we can't give out medical advice. Yes, that is a law. No, you're not our patient. Yes, you are your doctor's patient. No, not ours. No, yelling won't help. No, this is not an outrage. Yes, this is medically sound. Buh-bye now.

No, we can't give out patient information over the phone -- even if you're his separated conjoined twin calling from Mt. Erebus, Antartica. That's the law. Yes, really.

No. I don't set hospital policy and procedure or federal law. As a corollary, yelling at me won't make them change.

Seriously. If you have to ask if it's busy, you're not sick.

Yes. Seriously.

Attention self:

Stop worrying humanity will redeem itself even slightly in your eyes. So long as you drive on the streets and deal with people at work, it never will.

Of *course* they've left this place a fucked-up mess.

Never mind that they swore blind it'd allllll be up by 6 AM this morning. And they're now five hours behind schedule. This is only to be expected when the people who are in charge of FIXING the problem aren't the ones who suffer from it not being fixed.

I have to say, I like my boss normally, but I lose a lot of respect for her when she refuses to call a spade a spade. If some poor schmuck has his workload tripled or quadrupled by the incompetence of others, that person HAS gotten SCREWED. There isn't a valid counterargument for this point.

Argh. I hate my life.

A little backstory: I park on residential roads about two blocks away from the hospital where I work. I don't make enough money here to drop anywhere from $50 to $80 on a parking lease, not when they're unreliable and free parking is so close by.

Normally, barring street cleaning, this works out fine for the most part. However, the streets are not necessarily as wide as one might like. Consequently, when traffic backs up a little at the intersection where I turn into the residential ares, occasionally a person lacking foresight can accidentally block the incoming traffic by stopping in the middle of the street.

In mornings, a car dealership compounds this problem. Their service department usually has a line of cars waiting in the morning to enter, before the place has even opened. Usually, these people are intelligent enough to keep on the right side of the road.

But not today.

Today a woman stopped in this line in the middle of the street. There were, and I don't exaggerate here, four feet in front of her and four feet to her right, when I and another car ended up stuck, unable to get past her.

She did not move. Would not move, despite ample room, until the car in front of her pulled forward and she could no longer stand the honking from the car behind me. And what was the reason she screamed at me through her window as I passed, her justification for blocking traffic and willfully causing grief?

"I was here first."

Some guy in Medical Records just screamed at me for asking him to do his job.

And I mean that precisely literally. I asked him to perform one of the basic functions of medical records, that of having a patient go through the necessary process to have records released to her. For this, he yelled at me: a literal increase of volume combined with sarcasm, insults, and hostility.

How do people like that keep their jobs? How do they not get shot on the street?

JBBourgeoislsu: (Are you a guy or girl)

Sociable Dragon: (Actually, I'm a brain in a jar. Electrodes stimulate the various areas of my cortex to simulate sensory organs, and my spinal column is wired up to a complex series of servoes which function as limbs and manipulator organs. While at one point I may have been a particular gender, in honesty it was so long ago that I've forgotten.)

He didn't respond after that, sadly.

I picked up a real winner tonight!

( Read more... )

I'm a fighter. I can't help it. That doesn't necessarily mean I like it, of couse. But it just doesn't seem to be in my nature to simply lie down and die. I'm easy to make into a bad guy for the most specious of reasons. I can't rest easily unless I at least let my side be heard.

Really, between just taking abuse and fighting it, I can't win either way.

For those of you who knew about my sore throat thing, I did in fact ask the PA here at the hospital to give it a look. She decreed it nothing more serious than a mild cold with post-nasal drip, so you needn't worry on that score.

Incidentally, I hate people who think that they're better than other people because they have a fancy title, and feel it's okay to yell at people for accurate descriptions of their behaviors just because THEY don't like owning up to how they are. I guess people in a hospital setting tend to have that sort of attitude, but I've never had it with any of the docs I know, or most of the nurses. The people who I don't work with on a day to day basis are the ones who act like that.

But that's no surprise. Anonymity breeds stupidity. God, I HATE people. Scour the world, I say. Scour the world.


I work 12 hours today, tomorrow, and Saturday, and 8 hours on Sunday. After that... a blissful week of vacation. Between the stresses at work, and the even worse stresses at home, I need it. Assuming I survive to it, of course!

I've said it before.

I'll say it again.

I HATE PEOPLE WHO TIP MISERABLY.

I HATE THEM SO MUCH.

Especially when they make me a party to it.

Humanity is NOT endearing itself to me today.

I got a letter from work yesterday stating that I'd been fired, etc. etc. Unsurprisingly, they totally failed to get things straight, having failed to remove the dismissed charge and, I'm sure, utterly failed to address any of the issues I actually raised (see this post for details). So much of my time yesterday was spent firing off a letter to them demanding they record my objections and correctly update my file. Frankly, I don't know why I did this. It's not going to get me un-fired and I don't WANT to go back even if it would.

I think, partly, I'm just the sort of guy who insists on having the record straight. It sits terribly ill with me to have been dismissed for false reasons and ludicrous claims, and I want my side of the story to be heard. Then again, perhaps my letter can succeed in getting my old bosses in some well-deserved trouble for all the crap they pulled that they ought to be fired for, but aren't. On other hand, when (and I still expect this) the fight begins over my unemployment compensation, I don't want them saying that I never defended myself. I told them the same stuff I'll tell the UC people when the fight over this begins, and keep a copy of the letter (well, saved on my computer, God bless the electronic age) to prove that they knew and ignored my statements.

Grrr. I wish all these problems would just go away, but... there are too many jerks in the world for that.

The live-action Mage game I play in just isn't fun any more. Ever since the new cadre of storytellers got in place, it's been nothing but a giant character-fuck. The PCs face huge and unopposable opposition, every single thing they do is wrong and comes back to haunt them, and there's no opportunity for anything but running and hiding. The actions of the NPC organizations are entirely arbitrary, there's no rhyme or reason to what happens...

I wouldn't mind all of this so much if so much energy wasn't being devoted to a colossal ass-raping of my character. They've hated him ever since they took power -- in all seriousness, he was a specific complaint of many of them during the elections period. I don't even know why I continue to play.

So this woman who lives across the street from the house I work at had someone hit-and-run a car over the holidays, and all the evidence points to someone coming out of our driveway. Well, okay, Christmastime, lots of people pulling turns and using driveways to do it, right? She first came trying to blame it on one of the overnights -- said it was a white or silve van, not coincidentally the same color as the van the person she was accosting owns. Trouble for her was, it wasn't there that night at all.

So last night she comes back, and is poking around the car of one of my other staff members. On private property, screwing with private property. Then after she determines that the staff member's car couldn't have been the one responsible, she comes up to the house and tells the girl there that she knew who did it, it was a "green car", and she knew the last four numbers of the license plate, just not in the right order.

So in other words, she's trying to pin it on me now.

Let's think. She's changed her story three times now, from white van to blue car to green car. How do you get the last four numbers of a license plate, out of order, anyway? This is three weeks later, mind you, which means she's seen my car parked in front of the house or in the driveway about twenty times now. And only now she's coming forward, with a changed story, and accusations against me?

I'm worried she'll find some way to make it stick. I got my car used, so it came pre-banged, and there's no record of that so it's just her word against mine. I was there that night, and parked in the driveway. I remember the car, it was hell getting out with it parked where it was! And it's just my luck that I'd get hit with $3000 or whatever totally out of the blue.

In other news, I had the nightmare appointment at work today, driving around a parking garage for 45 minutes looking for a parking space. I'm wrecked, really and truly wrecked!

A random drunk guy all but followed me home tonight, babbling about his adventures with dogs and the police.

On the upside, the episode of Pokemon showed tonight was the Charmander one, which makes me happy.

Well, hell.

There is only one saving grace to being, once again, used, manipulated, lied to, and made a total fool of in relation to roleplaying, and that is the fact that this time it was me who took the brunt of it rather than my tigerphoenix. And because it wasn't the fault of the person who got us involved in the mess, I think it's feasible for both of us to forgive her and move past it.

Still, once again I've let my good nature, my empathy, and my desire for peace be used to make me defend someone who didn't deserve it. I fought for something I believed -- only to find out that all my cynicism, all my suspicion, is ultimately what I should have listened to.

Hypocrisy. Manipulation. Outright spite. You know, it hurts? It really hurts the people that have all this done to them. Myself more than most, I think, simply because I'm fire-aligned. I have far more passion, more emotion, for things than most people do.

I don't know. I shouldn't be trying to express this, because it can't be expressed in words. At least this time we got stabbed in the back by a relatively distant person.

Sitting here, watching my ping times grow. 2 seconds, 3 seconds, 4... I wonder what my roommates are doing that keeps it so high? I wonder why they aren't shot on violations of the DSL Fair Usage agreement...

Life favors the jerks.

So for a long time now, I've had to put up with my roommate blasting music into my room in the middle of the night. The other day, I finally got sick of it, and e-mailed my RA, asking him to please enforce the quiet hours.

My RA writes back, says he's going to see if it's a problem. I write back, saying it is. He writes back, saying it's not, despite the fact that it's a clear violation of the quiet hours. He offers to mediate.

I say no, and explain that my roommates would not agree to anything that they're not doing already, since they have no reason to, and furthermore they would make my life hell if they had a reason -- such as me dragging them into mediation.

He writes back offering to mediate.

I explain that mediation won't work, and that I've been suffering from this for 44 consecutive days, and would he please stop it before I do something drastic.

He writes back, offering to mediate. Then he gets the CA involved.

I ignore the CA and *again* explain to him that mediation WON'T WORK.

He writes back, saying that it's not a problem, and that he wants to talk to me because he's concerned about how frustrated I am.

Sick of this whole process, I ignore. So he gets the housefellow involved. Housefellow says, "Okay, you won't mediate, so move."

I write back explaining that moving will just make the situation worse, mediation WON'T WORK, and that I'm so damn sick of this whole process that I'd prefer to just drop the whole damn thing.

Housefellow says, oh no, we're not dropping this until I'm satisfied you won't kill your roommates. Oh yeah, and your RA was doing his job entirely right. Oh yeah, and you've completely misinterpreted quiet hours -- you can't complain about excessive noise coming from your own room, no matter how loud it is. So meet with me, or I'll make you meet with me.

I write back explaining, in GREAT DETAIL, why mediation won't work, why moving will just make things worse, and that the only damn reason I'm frustrated any more is that I'm being hassled to death, and that going back to just putting up with the noise would be heaven in comparison.

Of course, I'm already well aware that it isn't going to work... I'm going to get dragged into a damn stupid meeting with the damn stupid housefellow so he can play pop psychologist and evaluate how likely I am to harm my roommates.

Five bucks says he classifies me as some sort of serious threat and forces me to move.

Aaaaaargh.

Ah, I see the crank callers are back.

It's like I've always said... as soon as life hits the absolute lowest point... it finds a way to get lower.

::sigh::