"I mean COME ON!! Nine-thirty? Is she insane?"

I worked my final night in the ER tonight. The computers were down so we had to write out all the patient charts by hand. It takes a long time to get all the info into the charts this way, bringing the whole system to a crawl. The Group A contingent was quite displeased. A family of four came in and one of the kids had shoved a little plastic BB into his ear. When I asked the parents to fill out the triage form, they both said in unison "You mean we have to wait?!" Oh, I'm sorry did you say he had the BB in his ear? My goodness, that is a dire emergency warranting us to drop everything we are doing. In fact, if we don't attend to the boy immediately, the BB could actually fall out of his ear on its own. Wouldn't that make your whole trip to the ER not worthwhile?

I had to train another kid tonight. He was surprisingly competent. I noticed that we were wearing really similar glasses and he was also kind of balding. If it weren't for him being about 8 inches shorter than me, we could have been twins. Nurse Carl walked by the triage area and shouted over "Hey there Quagmire!, Hey there...mini Quagmire!" That Carl, what a goof.


So at the company where I work there is an unwritten rule about morning meetings. That rule states that you shall not schedule a meeting to begin before 10 AM. Part of the reasoning is that traffic is unpredictable here and it's entirely possible to be stuck for over an hour on the freeway, should there be an accident or something. The other, more pressing reason is because our workplace is composed predominantly of pasty, thick-glassed, nerdly computer programmers. The quintessential computer programmer work day begins at about noon and ends in the neighborhood of 4:30 AM. I think the sun is literally toxic to them. Think about it, have you ever seen a vampire and a computer programmer at the same time? So at about 3:30 PM today I get a meeting invitation for a 9:30 AM meeting tomorrow morning.

Normally I would merely grumble quietly about a 9:30 AM meeting. For a 9:30 AM meeting called in the late afternoon on the day before, I might actually bitch a little. However, for a 9:30 AM meeting called late in the afternoon on the day before when I have just over 1 week left before I quit, I erupt with insane, hair-raising cackles.

Small Asian Girl looks over and says "What's so funny?"

So I invite her over to my cube and show her this:









"We just got invited to a 9:30 AM meeting! I don't go to 9:30 AM meetings. I mean seriously, when is the last time someone called a 9:30 AM meeting? I mean COME ON!! Nine-thirty? Is she insane?"

Right after this rant I heard my boss say over my cubicle wall "You know, the whole company can hear you."

"OK, we'll keep it down," I said as I clicked the Tentative button on the meeting RSVP.