Things That Make you Go "Grrrrrr..."

You know, most of the time I try to have a good attitude about things, but sometimes I let life get to me.

This is one of those times.

To start off, I finally got the results back from my blood tests and ultrasound on my thyroid. I had been told that the results would be back by the end of the week. That is, the end of last week. As of Tuesday morning, I hadn't heard a thing, and was stressing myself out considerably over the results. Yes, I know the old adage that no news is good news, but my brain kept coming up with reasons why it was taking them so long to call me back with the results, and by Tuesday my brain had constructed this elaborate nightmare that the results were so bad that they had to fly in specialists to get a second opinion. I wasn't sleeping well, I was alternating between picking at my food and completely binging, and I spent much of Tuesday morning with a nervous stomach that rejected everything that I ate or drank for a few hours.

Now granted, I know that I'm not a big priority to Giant Health Association. HMOs are not known for their red-carpet treatment of patients. But when you have a new patient - new as in first appointment in the office - and you run tests and promise the patient you'll call with the results of said tests, then you should do it. After the complete rigamrole I had to go through to actually see the doctor and get the tests run, I didn't need the added annoyance of having to call Giant Health Association and sit on hold for twenty minutes and get bounced from department to department. And while the medical assistant that finally looked up my records was very courteous and read my results to me, she didn't have any idea what plan of action my nurse practitioner wanted to implement. She took down my name, work number, and home number and said that she would have Not Dr. Ruth call me so I could discuss the results with her.

I stressed to the medical assistant that I was at work until 5:00. Of course, she must have spoken a strange dialect where "I can be reached at work until 5" means "under no circumstances should you call me at work - leave a message on my answering machine at home, because this whole experience hasn't been frustrating enough for me!"

I finally got ahold of Not Dr. Ruth, and she explained that my thyroid levels were fine, but that I had a multi-nodular goiter (ewww... there's that word again). She offered to send me to an endocrinologist, but since the goiter (ewww) wasn't causing a problem, why would I want to give Giant Health Association any more of my money? We agreed that the best course of action was just to continue to monitor my thyroid for any changes. (So, I'm abnormal, but not dangerous at this time. Pretty much like I am in real life.)

Of course, then she goes on to tell me that one of the other tests came back incomplete, because they didn't manage to get a culture of one of the required types of cells, so I have to get another exam when I go back in for my next Depo booster in three months. This wasn't important enough to call me about either? Half the test is missing, and they figured they'd just let it slide and spring it on me in a few months? "Hey Myo, we know you're just here for a shot in the butt, but do you mind getting up on the table and putting your feet in the stirrups? We kinda messed up last time, and need to try again. Thanks!"

Um, I look upon my annual visit to the girly-bits doctor as a necessary evil. It's not my idea of a good time. I also look upon it as an annual thing.

Someday I'm going to look back on this and laugh.

And while I'm griping, I suppose I should include my laundry list of "stupid things that happen at work" while I'm at it...

I love my job, really I do. But sometimes the people I have to talk to when booking programs drive me crazy.

Today, for instance, I had to deal with a charter bus company. Now, charter bus companies don't like to give up the school's address or any other information for the reason that they are charging the school a different rate than we would charge them. The touring company is worried that the school will find out how much of a profit is being made by the "tour escorts" and won't book their services the following year. However, I've never had a bus company representative blatantly lie to me to prevent me from getting this information before.

When I asked for the school's address, the representative (let's call her BS Becky) said she didn't have that information because she didn't have the file in front of her. I explained that I needed that information, and she told me that I really didn't need it, since all of the arrangements were being made by BS Tours and the school would never again be coming to our zoo. I explained again that we needed to enter the school's information into the database for our records, she spouted off an address in a single breath. Since she had just told me that she didn't have the school's file, I was more than a little suspicious... especially when she didn't have the phone number. I went ahead and took the information, told her I would send the confirmation packet to her attention at BS Tours, and pulled up a search engine to find the school's phone number and verify the address. (Seems that BS Becky isn't aware of a little thing called the internet, or that almost every school in the nation has its own webpage, or that those webpages usually have contact information.)

Lo and behold, when I pulled up the school's website, the address I had been given was totally wrong. I called BS Tours back to verify their address, and discovered that the false school address was actually the old address of the tour company. Apparently they had just relocated their offices across town.

But none of this should really surprise me. After sending out an email invitation to some of our teachers for a Festival of Lights preview night where it very clearly stated (twice) that RSVPs were to be called into a specific phone number, I wasn't surprised to find that several of the teachers tried to RSVP by emailing me. It doesn't surprise me when teachers seem to overlook the "please call at least two weeks in advance to register your group" and call at 4:30 in the afternoon to set up a field trip for the next morning. It doesn't surprise me when home schools tell me that they can't schedule that far in advance, since they are unable to predict the weather. (Apparently home schools think that public schools have the power to do this, I guess.) And it doesn't surprise me in the least when teachers call to essentially ask me to write their zoo field trip curriculum. (I actually had one teacher tell me her school planned on bringing enough chaperones so the teachers wouldn't have to supervise any of the students.) Call me crazy, but I thought that teachers were paid to supervise and educate their students, not have me send them activities that the room mothers can distribute while the teachers sit in the restaurant and drink coffee.

Oh well. As a wise friend of mine once said, never underestimate the power of human stupidity... but don't dwell on it, either. I guess I should concentrate less on stupid things that I can't change, like teachers that can't read and doctors' offices that forget to call you back, and more on things within my power to change, like getting back up to quota on NaNoWriMo. I'm currently almost 5000 words behind. I'm such a slacker. It's going to be a long week and a half. Hope the coffee supply holds out.