BEV AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY

16 April 2002

I shouldn't have picked up the phone this morning. That was my first mistake. But I had just gotten out of the shower and didn't have my glasses on, so I couldn't see the caller ID and didn't realize it was The Psychologist. Had I seen that it was he, I would have pretended I wasn't home. I always do that when I owe him some work and haven't finished it yet. But I couldn't focus, and so we were talking. "It's going out in the mail today," I lied, knowing that I hadn't started it yet and was on my way to the office as soon as I got dressed.

Don't ever lie, children. God will punish you.

And she did.

You'll pardon me while I refer to my long list, won't you?

Walt had taken the car to San Francisco to help load a show in to the theatre and I was actually kind of excited because I was going to ride my bike to work for the first time. It was about 2 miles, I guesstimated, and hey--I'd done 10 on Saturday, so this would be a piece o'cake. And it was. Well except for The Gate. I tried to stay off the busiest street, so went down a kind of alley. I knew it connected with the back street to the office and thought I was being ever so clever. However, there's a gate there. One of those zig zag gates and I foolishly thought I could maneuver the bike around it. I then learned that the purpose of the gate was probably to keep cyclists from using that route.

After several minutes where, if I had been filmed by Candid Camera, I would have been a featured segment, I finally managed to get the bike back out, turn around from whence I came and go the proper way. It took about 20 minutes to get to the office, including the 5 that I spend with the @%$! gate.

Taking the bike, meant I had to cancel a luncheon date I had made with a friend on the other side of town. It's fine to have a mid-day lunch date when you have a car, but with a bike, and limited time, it ain't gonna work.

When I got to the office and sat in my chair, it was broken. I felt like one of the three bears. "Who's been sitting in my chair!!!"

Well, I knew who'd been in my chair. A kid. See, on Thursday, I had a tantrum that nobody knew about but me. I work on Thursday, Dr. G doesn't. The nurse-practitioner does, and her assistant is the infamous "F," the woman I replaced. Well, when I walked in, there was a little kid in my chair, the nurse practitioner was locked away in Dr. G's office, so I couldn't retreat there to work, and F was having a high old time with the patients. The radio was blasting at my elbow and it was absolutely impossible to hear anything. I didn't want to make a scene in front of the patients, and thought perhaps F would get the message if I angrily gathered up my work and the phone and went into the bathroom. She didn't.

I finally asked her when they would be out of there. She said 4:30, and I said I'd be back then. Only I had to review a show that night and didn't go back. I also discovered this weekend now nice it is to have a real life like normal folks--you know, do something fun on the weekend? In all of my playing around on bike rides, I just never went back to the office, figuring that I'd go in early today, which I had now done.

But my chair was broken. The back support piece was tilted at a 45 degree angle and there was no way I could sit in it. I was livid. I couldn't get it to budge at all, so I put it in the Nurse Practitioner's office and took her chair, only her chair was far too low, so there was nothing else to do but figure out how to fix the damn chair. It took 30 minutes, but I finally had it back to sort of the way it had been. Not perfect, but usable.

Then I called the Nurse Practitioner. I didn't want to get Dr. G involved, figuring I'm a big girl now and can handle things myself. "We have a problem," I told her. We discussed it, she apologized, said she'd take care of F (who last week also screwed me up by removing a box that was waiting for a lab to pick up a Pap smear--I didn't discover THAT until a week later, when the Pap smear was still sitting there!). Anyway, the NP asked me if I could do her a favor and look up a phone number in her rolodex. And in doing so, I knocked all the cards out of the rolodex and had to spend time putting them all back.

I did some vacuuming, but I'm sure the office vacuum cleaner must have cost all of about $1.50 new and is very old. Every time you move it (and you kinda have to move the damn thing to vacuum), it falls apart. Dr. G's wife promised me a new one the last time she had to use it and found out how awful it is--but that was two weeks ago and I have not seen a new vacuum cleaner since then.

The phone rang incessantly from the moment I walked in the door. In the first 20 minutes, five people rescheduled appointments.

I was really getting pretty antsy and angry and all sorts of not very nice things so I checked my watch and discovered it was 11:30 and I had skipped my mid-morning snack, after having only a small breakfast (and having been up working since 3:30 a.m.)

So I got my purse and walked to the supermarket which is near the office. When I got there, I went to take my wallet out of my purse--and it wasn't there. I remembered that when I got home from the club this morning, I had left it in the glove compartment of the car--the car that was in San Francisco at that moment. So no food for me.

Fortunately, I had one cup of dry soup mix at the office, and I made that, but it's a pretty skimpy lunch.

Making the soup emptied the water bottle on our hot/cold machine, so I went to replace the 5 gallon bottle. This is something I do all the time at home. But today, I managed to smash my finger doing it. The air turned blue as I became rather un-ladylike (I was alone in the office still).

Dr. G arrived and took in his first patient. He told me he needed the progress notes from his last visit with her last week. Only the progress notes were on a tape that I was supposed to transcribe over the weekend, but didn't because the tape was in his office with the nurse practitioner when I had my snit and walked out on Thursday. He was not happy.

Then he went to do an exam and discovered he had run out of the right size speculums. I had completely forgotten that I planned to wash speculums on Thursday, but couldn't because of having no access to the exam room. I realized that since our first patient tomorrow is at 9 a.m., I'd have to stay after hours to get them scrubbed and into the sterilizer. Our last patient arrived at 6 p.m. and it was nearly 7:30 before she left.

The one good thing was that I had the bright idea to call Walt to see if he was home. He was, so I asked him to come and get my bike and leave me the car, so I wouldn't have to bike home in the dark. Thank goodness, he did.

The first Pap smear was a bust. The lab sent us new brushes and they don't work. Oh, they work to take the smear, but you then have a 2" bottle and a 6" brush, so you snap off the handle and just put the brush part into the bottle. Only the new brushes don't snap. They don't even bend. Dr. G was not happy again.

Then for some reason known only to him, he decided this was the day he was going to quiz me during ultrasound exams. "Can you point out the vein and artery?" He asked. Uh...no. "Let's see how good you are--where is the corpus luteum cyst." Flunked again. This was definitely not my day.

Finally, it was all over. He had to rush home to get to a social event. He was out the door. I still had 45 minutes of clean up and speculum washing to do. And then a night of typing--the stack consists of 4 tapes from the psychiatrist, 3 from the psychologist, 3 from Dr. G, with a promise that he will get the rest of his book dictated tomorrow so I can transcribe it all before I leave for Seattle on Thursday.

As he closed the door behind him, I put my head in my hands and just started crying. I had spent 9-1/2 hours at my part time job. I hadn't even had a coffee break. I had almost no food, and I faced hours of typing when I got home.