The Self Improvement Store

If there was a self improvement store, I'd be a steady customer.

First, I'd find the patience section and stock up for life.  I'd buy it by the truckload and keep a little in my back pocket everywhere I went.

Second, I'd browse the tolerance display and take several six packs.

And most important, I'd stop by the anger management booth and take everything they had.

Alas, although it should, the world doesn't work that way.

By three o'clock on a Monday, three patients have simply not bothered to show up, two called just minutes before they should've been there to cancel, and one has casually strolled in, an hour and a quarter late.  The computers - like coaxing molasses uphill in a blizzard on their best days - have gone into crash mode and the best we can get is a half dozen keystrokes before they freeze up.  The doctor, idle and irritated by all this non-productive free time, is underfoot and in the way, peering over my shoulder, asking insulting questions and issuing unnecessary orders.  He hovers and hangs over me and shuffles my neat piles of end of day paperwork until I snatch them away and suggest he go take a nap.

What's tomorrow look like? he wants to know, as if he couldn't just look at his own laptop and see for himself.

Did you call maintenance about the light fixture? he asks for the third time.

Are the surgical charts done?  he demands although he knows perfectly well they're on his desk.

Don't forget to get a better 'phone number for our last patient, if she shows up, he tells me for the fourth time, You can explain that we need to be able to reach them in the event of..... But this is finally too much for me and I turn on him.

Six years! I snap, Six years I've worked for you and you're still reminding me to turn out the lights!  Now go 'way! I don't need to be told why we need to be able to reach patients or how to explain it to them!

You worry about the medicine and let me worry about the paperwork! Now shoo!

Nobody likes a wise ass receptionist, he mutters but at least he goes.

Nor a micro managing doctor, I mutter right back.

Yep.  A self improvement store would make a fortune.  

Let me be sure I understand this, I tell the woman on the phone,  Nine or ten years ago your husband had warts and a doctor - whose name you don't remember - gave him a cardiac medicine - the name of which you don't remember - but it cost $800 and worked really well on the warts.  And now the warts are back and you want Dr M to give him the same medicine but without benefit of examining him or knowing what it was?

See? she says impatiently, It's simple.  I'm not going to bring him in unless the doctor will give him the medicine.

Open 7 days.  Discounts for the chronically stupid in our patient department.