I don't like pepper on my food. Never have, never will.
During the last days of my second marriage - when we were speaking at all - I repeatedly asked my husband not to put pepper on my steak. He repeatedly ignored me.
It might've been because he thought I should like pepper on my steak.
It might've been because he thought I would come to like pepper on my steak.
The truth was, that he liked pepper on his steak in much the same way as he liked always knowing better than anyone else and having a better way of doing just about everything. He didn't care in the slightest about my likes or dislikes but he did enjoy making decisions for me. Until the night when I heaved an entire prime rib, plate and all - ruined and blackened with pepper - in his general direction and snarled that the dogs could have it. I'd reached my limit of being dismissed and ignored and bullied and while it was a waste of a fine prime rib, at least it got his attention, albeit briefly.
Until recently, I thought I was done with this kind of mindset but I hadn't reckoned on ol' Ace's arrival at the workplace. Now it seems I have to fight the same battle all over again although of course this time it isn't about pepper or steak but rather about paperwork and forms, policies and the way things work. It's about sign in sheets and clipboards and changing procedures out of arrogance. And it's about manners, about calling someone 20 or 30 years older by their first name without being invited to. It's about unsolicited change based on arrogance and despite the fact that it compromises the process.
I watched him take 40 patient encounter forms off their respective clipboards and lay them in a sloppy pile on his desk where he then re-attached each and every one when the patients actually arrived. He felt no need to explain this curious and slightly roundabout method of getting from point A to point B.
I watched him dump all our sign in sheets into a trash barrel. Presumably, he has a better design in mind but he didn't mention or produce it.
I listened to him call an eighty-one year old nun he'd never met before by her first name.
And I was the one who had to explain to a patient who'd been told to come right in (and did) why there was no one in the office and the door was locked because ol' Ace - so eager to be seen as a go-getter and better than the rest of us put together - hadn't bothered to ask which office he would be coming to and the patient arrived at the one some 70 miles away. So sorry.
After this miserable day finally ends, I come home and try desperately to let go of my anger. Condescending,
egotistical, controlling, I think. Secretive to the point of paranoia, I think. A bully with women and a coward with men, I think. A blatant and shameless liar, I think. He moves and talks as if in an LSD kind of daze and responds to questions with a vacant, slack jawed stare that makes me think of people who climb clock towers with rifles. And yet I have to find a way to work with him or call it a day 'cause I can't shoot him.
But I might could hire someone.
Until recently, I thought I was done with this kind of mindset but I hadn't reckoned on ol' Ace's arrival at the workplace. Now it seems I have to fight the same battle all over again although of course this time it isn't about pepper or steak but rather about paperwork and forms, policies and the way things work. It's about sign in sheets and clipboards and changing procedures out of arrogance. And it's about manners, about calling someone 20 or 30 years older by their first name without being invited to. It's about unsolicited change based on arrogance and despite the fact that it compromises the process.
I watched him take 40 patient encounter forms off their respective clipboards and lay them in a sloppy pile on his desk where he then re-attached each and every one when the patients actually arrived. He felt no need to explain this curious and slightly roundabout method of getting from point A to point B.
I watched him dump all our sign in sheets into a trash barrel. Presumably, he has a better design in mind but he didn't mention or produce it.
I listened to him call an eighty-one year old nun he'd never met before by her first name.
And I was the one who had to explain to a patient who'd been told to come right in (and did) why there was no one in the office and the door was locked because ol' Ace - so eager to be seen as a go-getter and better than the rest of us put together - hadn't bothered to ask which office he would be coming to and the patient arrived at the one some 70 miles away. So sorry.
After this miserable day finally ends, I come home and try desperately to let go of my anger. Condescending,
egotistical, controlling, I think. Secretive to the point of paranoia, I think. A bully with women and a coward with men, I think. A blatant and shameless liar, I think. He moves and talks as if in an LSD kind of daze and responds to questions with a vacant, slack jawed stare that makes me think of people who climb clock towers with rifles. And yet I have to find a way to work with him or call it a day 'cause I can't shoot him.
But I might could hire someone.
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