When We Get to England

There is this very nice woman who works for the hospital. Very nice. She was tasked with informing us that the program cancelled an internet service that tracked a lot of our clerical information. It was apparently expensive and had some other issues. So the program cancelled it. Reasonable enough. No big deal.

So this nice woman was informing us of the change at a meeting of about 50 physicians. She went on to say that now the information would be collected by hand and conveyed to us by monthly printed handouts, so we could have ‘real time access to the information.’

Without thinking, I interrupted her, saying ‘monthly handouts haven’t been considered “real time” since seventeenth century London.’

This got a good laugh from the crowd, which made me immediately feel guilty. I don’t really care about this internet service. I just saw a poor choice of words and preyed upon this woman.

Unfortunately, she tried to defend the ‘real time’ access, and though I looked for a way to stop, I didn’t let her out. Finally the Program Director intervened and parried with, ‘we’re working on getting a new online service. This is just a temporary fix.’

After the meeting I got a lot of back slaps from the other physicians for my outburst, because we are assholes. And I seem to be working on becoming the King asshole.