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We put our new treadmill in place weeks ago, but today’s the first time (after lots of sniffing, watching, hovering around) that the cat stepped onto the moving belt.

The results were pretty much as you’d imagine…

… was sleepwalking because she dreamed someone was about to drop her baby.

Managed to trip and give herself a skull fracture.

Wow.

So my job  changed slightly a few months ago (same job, same people, slight change in title) and supposedly I was to keep my insurance just as it was.

But didn’t have a reason to check that out until recently; went to fill a prescription.  They inform me my insurance is expired.

HR tells me it’s because I didn’t attend “New Employee Orientation”.

Um, guys, I’ve worked for you in one capacity or another for… well, around ten years now.  You’ve made me attend new employee orientation four times already, so far.  I already hold the department record for most times required to attend new employee orientation!

No matter.  I have to attend if I want health insurance.  

SIgh.

I saw a new patient today, who’d made an appointment for evaluation of headaches.

In the course of the conversation his wife mentioned he has episodes where he “hears voices”.  He’d recently lost a job because he spent too much time talking to those voices.

I asked whether he can tell the difference – for example, could he tell the difference between my voice and one of those voices.

“Oh, sure,” he said.  “Those voices are different. They’re like… you know, when God talks to you.”

“You think that the voices are God?”

“No, ” (looks at me like I’m an idiot) “It’s just that they sound the exact same way that it sounds when God talks to you.”

I just gotta say, I didn’t find this reference helpful, ’cause I’ve never had a personal conversation with God. Obviously, my background is insufficient to really relate to this man’s experience…

Yeah, I know everyone and his brother are commenting on that. I can’t help joining in.  Thoughts:

• Natural death… or murder?  If he was going to die under the strain of it all, why not when the guilty verdict was first passed?  Alternative explanations might include suicide, or murder – is it harder for lawsuits to get their hands on money that’s been passed on to his wife?
• Boy, I guess that gets someone out of the nasty job of figuring out how to sentence him.
• Legal fees paid?  I bet his lawyer has invested a lot of hours in his civil and criminal suits, was it pay-as-you-go?
• Will the public now turn to Skilling as the demon du jour, since their favorite whipping boy is gone?
• I can’t find anything on the web about it, but supposedly one of the Colorado papers had a headline “God pardons Ken Lay”.  Snicker.

So, I walked into clinic this afternoon (i started at lunchtime) and the nurse manager of the clinic approached and said “I hear you had a nice call last night!”

My first thought was that the call service had contacted her with an apology.  But, no, it turns out that a really pissed off psychologist was calling because her pager was going off all friggin’ long with calls for our clinic….

It just occurred to me that if I’d been clever, I could have paged that (transposed) number early in the weekend and told the recipient to call me directly if she was bothered again.  Then I’d have known to raise h*** with the call center earlier on.  On the other hand, the call center supervisor I spoke to Saturday never quite admitted that the number in her system was wrong, so I’d have been going out on a limb there.

Saturday morning I had frustration with the call service, as detailed in my last note.  However, it seemed reasonable the problem was solved:

• The call service supervisor had identified that the digits were transposed in her system,
• She’d successfully paged me five times with that system, and
• She promised that for the rest of the weekend, the service would contact me within 30 minutes by phone after each call, to be sure it got through. (this last one was sure to make me miserable but it seemed better than missing an important call.  The alternative would be to have them call me directly – but I wanted to test the pager system as well)

So life seemed good.  Had a long stretch with no calls Saturday but a call to the service verified there really weren’t any calls. Had some calls come through normally Sunday morning.

So then there was a long stretch Sunday with no calls.  At this point, I thought we’d identified the problem and seen it working properly, so I was willing to believe it was just a quiet time. Silly me.

After dinner yesterday, my phone rings. It’s a supervisor (a different one) from the call center, asking why I’m not responding to my calls.  We go through the whole thing again, he checks the system, and… lookee here!  The last two digits of your phone number are transposed in the system! Gee, how could that happen?

I was pissed, frankly.  Even more so when I discovered there were two calls that had been waiting, for hours, because no one followed the instructions to call my home phone.  And one had profuse bleeding and the other had possible appendicitis – neither needed to be kept waiting for hours!

So I’ll be making some formal complaints today. This is ridiculous.

Call is really not easier when the call service is incompetent.  After a long stretch of no calls I contacted them to see what was up.  “Oh, we’ve paged you five times, didn’t you get them?” …no, and since my pager keeps a record of the calls it received, I feel confident I truly didn’t get them, as opposed to just sleeping through them or something.  “Oh, that explains why someone else was calling us and telling us we have the wrong person!”  Um… and you didn’t bother to call my home number to figure out why that was happening? And you act surprised that I didn’t get the pages, when you had proof already they’d gone to someone else?

They read off my pager number to me; they had two numbers transposed.  What’s weird is they were paging me successfully yesterday, and got another through this AM – but they claim they’re using an automated system, so I can’t assume they have a dyslexic operator causing all the fuss.

Result after catching up on all the calls I missed: one of them was a valid thing to call about.  The others were people who had their symptoms earlier in the week but simply couldn’t be bothered to do anything about them until Saturday morning.  I told them to continue the things they’d been doing all week, come see us during business hours Monday, and go to an urgent care center over the weekend if they simply couldn’t stand to wait until Monday.

Perhaps I’m unreasonable. To me, people who call a doctor after-hours entirely because of convenience are incredibly rude, and I feel very little motivation to go out of my way to make their lives easier. 

Sigh.  First night of weekend call down; two more to go… Monday morning can’t come fast enough…

So I have this little cat. Increasingly little, in fact, because she eats very little and has to be tempted to eat even that.  Which is typical of many old people so I guess it can be typical of an old cat as well. And if I’ve been at work all day, she’ll ignore food in favor of cuddling as close to me as she can, all evening long.

I think it’s worth the odor of trout feast next to my chair, if it’ll get a few calories into my rapidly disappearing cat….

I often see people put lengthy posts behind a “cut” so that they can shorten the piece that ends up on their friends’ list.  I like the idea but haven’t quite figured out how it works. So this is an attempt at creating a LJ cut: