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.

die vielen leute

It’s easy to forget what a cross-section looks like. I never saw it in the office; there, I saw retirees, the gainfully employed, and their children. This is not a true cross-section. When you spend your life shuttling between home, work, and a relatively upscale supermarket, you’re insulated from society at large.

As docs, we see something close to a cross-section in our emergency rooms. But in the ER, it’s all too simple to fall back on old prejudices. This is not what the world is. Normal people don’t get (fill in the blank).

Jaw fractures, for example. With rare exception (we ENTs say to one another), normal people don’t break their jaws. Assholes who pick fights, they’re the ones who break their jaws. Or, more properly speaking, and one of the rare cases where the passive voice really does make sense: they get their jaws broken for them.

We did the DMV thing today: California license and registration for both of us and our vehicles. Folks waiting at the DMV truly do represent a cross-section of our neighborhood. Young mothers with their toddlers . . . two three-year-olds make an on-the-spot friendship, and when one kid’s mom gets called to a window, the girl waves and says, “Bye!” The other girl says, “Bye!” And because neither learned when to stop, the ‘byes’ continue for the next two minutes.

An old man stands behind my wife, talking nonstop in a perfectly ordinary conversational tone. A sign of the times: I don’t assume he’s crazy (yet), I check his ears for wireless first. Nope, no wireless — he’s nuts. He’s not holding a number, and no one bothers to tell him he’ll need a number before the DMV workers will talk to him.

Students in dreadlocks rib each other to pass the time . . . a Middle Eastern man insists to the gal taking pictures that he’s such a great driver, he didn’t need to read the handbook . . . an overweight white dude huffs his oxygen . . . a dad brings in his teenage son for his first written test. The woman taking my forms finds out I’m a doctor and chats me up about her panic attacks when she takes benadryl at night. (So don’t take benadryl at night.) Young people who seem to be compos mentis walk up to windows expecting to be seen. No number? See ya later!

The masses titillate me/scare me/bore me. But even when they bore me, I can’t resist looking, peeking into their lives. I can’t resist listening in.

Is there a word for that, to be bored and yet feel compelled to look?

D.