Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
The new boss, etc.
Do I even have a boss? I don’t know about that. I have a supervisor, but since he was my junior resident when I was a chief resident, I’m pretty sure I can still order him around. First time I try it, I’ll let you know how that goes.
He has a supervisor, too — what the organization calls a PIC (Physician In Charge). I don’t even know that doctor’s name. And I assume there are shadowy administrators lurking in their top-floor offices futzing with processes and action plans and talking about “drilling down on the numbers.” I get the sense I could work 25 years here and never once meet an administrator.
First day was all about benefits and IT. I’m gonna get a whole lot of IT in the next two days. Tomorrow’s all about EMR (electronic medical records) and HIPAA (government regulations, or maybe Highly Infectious Parasitic Anti-Aircraft devices — yeah, that’s it!) And more IT on Wednesday. Not exciting stuff. If I could fault them for anything today, it was the lack of coffee.
I spent the morning with two other new docs. One’s a psychiatrist and the other is a hospitalist. They’re both Chinese, so right away they had to compare notes as to what languages they understood. The guy spoke Mandarin, and the woman spoke Fukienese. This word, by the way, sounds like “foo king ease,” at least to my ears. It’s the language of people from Fujian, or Fukien, or Fu-chien. I have just enough Beavis and Butthead in me to WANT to chortle over the spoken word, “Fukienese.” If I were single, I’m sure I would have asked this woman, “Can you teach me Fukienese?” And then I would have laughed so hard, I would have sprayed her with saliva.
Good thing I’m not single.
The commute took 1 hr 20 min going in, 1 hr 30 min coming home. Kind of a drag, but you know what? I think I’m going to be happy there. And after what happened to me in Santa Rosa, I’ve decided I can put up with a lot if the job makes me happy.
I’ll keep you posted.
D.
Yeah, I’ve gone from a 12 minute commute to one of 50 minutes at 5AM, 80 minutes at 7AM, and I’m much happier.
EEEE, that’s a hell of a commute, but if the work place is better, then it’s a good trade off.
Better to be tired and happy than well rested and miserable. And I wasn’t all that well rested, anyway, since I was so miserable I couldn’t sleep more than five hours at a stretch.
IT as in Information Technology? Good, you’ll be able to debug my perl code when it goes awry.