11:34 p.m. - 25 July 2002
Music and more job stuff
Sometimes I wonder how I manage to function in everyday society. Especially when I don’t function well.
Today, for instance, I completely forgot to put on deodorant. I didn’t even realize it until I’d been at work for an hour or so and realized I was feeling a little, um, off. Of course, today was the day of an open house for the finance department which recently moved to an office across the street. And, of course, today was one of those hot muggy days that the coastal south is well known for. By the end of the day I was keeping my arms clamped down against my side.
It’s really kind of reflection of how this week has gone. I’m not really trying to frighten the new person into not wanting the job, but every time she remarks about how many different things I have to keep track of and take care of I remind her that she will not only be doing all of my job but several of the things that Kathy has been doing as well. Like the 7am meetings three times a month. And a couple of the credentialing details. And the responsibility for knowing and implementing all the Joint Commission standards.
Add to this the fact that Kathy and I keep finding things that she doesn’t know how to do. I was working on some minutes today, with her looking over my shoulder, and these particular minutes are best done with quite a bit of copying and pasting to ensure the same verbiage and spacing. I told her at the outset what I was doing, yet much later she hadn’t seem to grasp the idea of pasting the same bit of information several times in a row to preserve the spacing. This was after she asked me to show her how to make a row in Excel print at the top of every page. Did I mention that the job requirements included proficiency with Microsoft Office applications? Then again, the job requirements don’t really seem to apply to her.
While tooling around the web this afternoon, I thought I’d found the answer to our problems. There’s a hospital in a town about 35 minutes and while I was looking at job opportunities I noticed one for a credentialing specialist. I meet or exceed all of the requirements and Kathy told me that she’d write me a great recommendation. She also said that she’d love to tell people that I was leaving because I’d gotten a credentialing job.
But when I looked at the web site a little more carefully, I realized that the listings included all of the hospitals in a system, and not necessarily the one that’s close by. I’ll have to call the main employment office tomorrow and find out exactly where the position is.
But oh, man, would it be sweet to get that position. It would be the ultimate “fuck you” to the administration that wouldn’t give me the position where I am now. Particularly since Kathy tried every which way she could to keep me upstairs with her instead of going downstairs. It’s a damn shame the new person’s husband works in Administration, since she’d be perfect for that job.
I’m tired of talking about my job. I’m tired of thinking about my job. I’d rather talk about my garden, but alas, it’s kind of a mess. Okay, it’s a big mess. I think our tomatoes have the wilt, and aren’t doing well. All the rain of the last several days is making the ones that were ripening split. We’re drowning in peppers, red and yellow and jalepeno. This weekend I’m going to see how well roasted peppers freeze. I don’t really know of any other way of semi-preserving them. Except for freezing chopped peppers, which I will also do.
I’m camped in front of The Red Violin at the moment, although I’m really waiting for the special that’s coming on after it, which is a concert of the music from the film. Mostly what it makes me think of is how little I really know about classical music, even though I know enough that technically, classical music is from very narrow period of time. I keep picking up and putting back Classical Music for Dummies, at least in part because I don’t know how much good it would really do me.
I can read music, sort of; mostly I can follow along rather than being able to hear it in my head. I started piano lessons too late to really be any good, but I can pick out a melody. My sense of tempo sucks, though. And I was always too worried about getting the notes right to play expressively. It didn’t help that we had an electronic keyboard rather than a regular piano; the feel of the keys is different, no matter how good the keyboard is.
Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to bugging a certain someone who was a music history major about some recommendations for books and/or pieces to get started with. If only I knew someone like that...
