All Work Makes Linda a Dull Goober
Yeah, that says it all, huh?
Last night around 7PM, Miki and I sat in front of the telly watching BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs series and I promptly passed out after seeing a large muttaburrasaurus go hogwild when a flurry of mosquitoes had a block party in its ear. When I finally woke up 2 hours later, the meteors obliterated all of the dinosaurs leaving our planet with new species of birds and animals. While trying to pry my eyelids apart, I saw this humungous, mutated, repulsive-looking creature smacked right in the center of the TV screen. This thing, called a Gastonis, looked like it was an end result of a science experiment that had gone horribly wrong - a mishmash of parrot, chicken and emu rolled into one.
Yuck.
I don't usually fall asleep like this, so this was a clear indication how I tired was. After spending so many hours in the office and totally neglecting everything at home, I'm beat. I've designed and reformatted forms, order a slew of supplies, devised interesting techniques to train Grace and tried my very best not to get into a pissing matches with nasty patients.
Not only am I physically tired of all of the things going on, I'm also mentally exhausted with having to contest with these cross-cultural 'tudes. Businesses in Chinatown have a completely different set of practices which can be quite stressful. I'm talking about having to work longer hours (weekend-wise), modified ethics, specific conveniences, and screaming matches with cheapskates.
Because we have a high percentage of Fukienese patients, they have an entirely different mindset than other dialect groups. I absolutely REFUSE to modify the business practice to deliberately to CATER to these jackasses. Granted, I'm dissing out my own kind, but really, enough is enough. They come in, without an appointment and have to bitch about having long waits. This is where I come in to contend with such negativity. I cannot sit by and have them tarnish the good name of the practice just because they can't adhere to simple rules.
Plus, this is what burns me more than anything else. These assholes get FREE healthcare. At least 50% of this population do NOT deserve this government benefit since they make money off the books. Because I pay for their healthcare right out of my paycheck via NYS taxes, they OUGHT to wait their damn turn. I have every right to bump up those patients who are paying hundreds of dollars out of pocket just to see the doctor.
Those who pay cash for their medical services never seem to give us a hard time. This very fact stumps me.
Then you get the crowd of schmucks who complain that I don't speak Mandarin or can't answer any of their insurance questions. Since when did I become a healthcare representative? Learn the damn language while you're in this country.
Last but not least, I get an odd lot who absolutely insist that I play phlebotomist, refill their scripts, and provide referrals in the absence of the doctor. When I promptly inform that I was in no position to do so, especially without a license, they spit back with a snide and gassy remark: "Well, what the hell did he hire you for?"
To deal with you stupid asswipes.
Last night around 7PM, Miki and I sat in front of the telly watching BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs series and I promptly passed out after seeing a large muttaburrasaurus go hogwild when a flurry of mosquitoes had a block party in its ear. When I finally woke up 2 hours later, the meteors obliterated all of the dinosaurs leaving our planet with new species of birds and animals. While trying to pry my eyelids apart, I saw this humungous, mutated, repulsive-looking creature smacked right in the center of the TV screen. This thing, called a Gastonis, looked like it was an end result of a science experiment that had gone horribly wrong - a mishmash of parrot, chicken and emu rolled into one.
Yuck.
I don't usually fall asleep like this, so this was a clear indication how I tired was. After spending so many hours in the office and totally neglecting everything at home, I'm beat. I've designed and reformatted forms, order a slew of supplies, devised interesting techniques to train Grace and tried my very best not to get into a pissing matches with nasty patients.
Not only am I physically tired of all of the things going on, I'm also mentally exhausted with having to contest with these cross-cultural 'tudes. Businesses in Chinatown have a completely different set of practices which can be quite stressful. I'm talking about having to work longer hours (weekend-wise), modified ethics, specific conveniences, and screaming matches with cheapskates.
Because we have a high percentage of Fukienese patients, they have an entirely different mindset than other dialect groups. I absolutely REFUSE to modify the business practice to deliberately to CATER to these jackasses. Granted, I'm dissing out my own kind, but really, enough is enough. They come in, without an appointment and have to bitch about having long waits. This is where I come in to contend with such negativity. I cannot sit by and have them tarnish the good name of the practice just because they can't adhere to simple rules.
Plus, this is what burns me more than anything else. These assholes get FREE healthcare. At least 50% of this population do NOT deserve this government benefit since they make money off the books. Because I pay for their healthcare right out of my paycheck via NYS taxes, they OUGHT to wait their damn turn. I have every right to bump up those patients who are paying hundreds of dollars out of pocket just to see the doctor.
Those who pay cash for their medical services never seem to give us a hard time. This very fact stumps me.
Then you get the crowd of schmucks who complain that I don't speak Mandarin or can't answer any of their insurance questions. Since when did I become a healthcare representative? Learn the damn language while you're in this country.
Last but not least, I get an odd lot who absolutely insist that I play phlebotomist, refill their scripts, and provide referrals in the absence of the doctor. When I promptly inform that I was in no position to do so, especially without a license, they spit back with a snide and gassy remark: "Well, what the hell did he hire you for?"
To deal with you stupid asswipes.
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Reminds me of the child mortality rate in Washington DC, which is something like 12% in some neighbourhoods, because people WON'T take their kids to the doctors, ever, because they think the immigration authorities will get them. THe kids don't go to school either. Totally under the radar.
But even the most shrill Republican pretentious moralizing about "values" seems ridiculous in comparison to the everyday reality here - where you have families going into the fourth generation where no one has worked a day in their life and they get a salad bar of housing, tax, food, "disability", and "incapacity" benefits. In Glasgow one out of three adults are claiming "disability". In some neighbourhoods the "economic inactivity" (unemployment + welfare dependence) is between 50 and 60%. So, one out of three adults don't work, and of the two that do, 40% are employed by the public sector/government. People who work in this country are regarded as sponges for squeezing - and unabashedly so in parts of the country, like Scotland, where double digit growth in the public sector per year is done with no shame or comprehension of why it should be shameful.
Meanwhile, hubby and me ended up at the bankruptcy lawyers because I as a multilingual university graduate was overqualified for every job there was and yet would be deported if I so much as applied for unemployment benefits.
But even the most shrill Republican pretentious moralizing about "values" seems ridiculous in comparison to the everyday reality here - where you have families going into the fourth generation where no one has worked a day in their life and they get a salad bar of housing, tax, food, "disability", and "incapacity" benefits. In Glasgow one out of three adults are claiming "disability". In some neighbourhoods the "economic inactivity" (unemployment + welfare dependence) is between 50 and 60%. So, one out of three adults don't work, and of the two that do, 40% are employed by the public sector/government. People who work in this country are regarded as sponges for squeezing - and unabashedly so in parts of the country, like Scotland, where double digit growth in the public sector per year is done with no shame or comprehension of why it should be shameful.
Meanwhile, hubby and me ended up at the bankruptcy lawyers because I as a multilingual university graduate was overqualified for every job there was and yet would be deported if I so much as applied for unemployment benefits.
Ugh..the thought of being forced to go backwards makes me rather nauseous.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is the unemployment situation in Scotland a lot like being in the South Bronx/ Harlem / Newark, NJ?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is the unemployment situation in Scotland a lot like being in the South Bronx/ Harlem / Newark, NJ?
It's funny you mention that. When I got the job at the community development agency, the one where I had to spew out all the garbage about spongers being "victims of social exclusion" etc, I was chosen out of 32 applicants, despite it being my first real job in Scotland as well as my first full-time marcomms role.
From the start, the then-managing director - this English prep school twit who clearly had no idea that he was gay (you know the type) went on and on about this fact finding trip he'd done to the States, visiting community development and get-people-into-work type agencies in Chicago and Seattle. He'd never had an original thought in his life and came back singing about how we were going to do everything that the Seattle agency was doing, right down to copying their web site.
And this was where I first put my foot down and made a stand that he and the #2 (Lady Macbeth) absolutely could not comprehend.
What they just didn't get is that in a community development organisation in Seattle, you have 1) 36 churches per neighbourhood offering the services which are all state run and taxpayer funded here, down to babysitting; that 2) the most "deprived" people in Seattle just got off a boat and don't know how to read or write their own language, much less English - their problem is not that they left school and had a baby at 14 as a conscious decision; and most importantly - 3) that the US is NOT A WELFARE STATE.
They absolutely could not comprehend that the basic starting point that Seattle's "deprived" began from bears no resemblance in any way to the only starting point that they were used to, being the Scottish one. Since the Clinton era reforms, you can't get benefits for more than, what, two years. In Scotland, "incapacity benefit" is given for 17 years with no checkups or breaks and no questions asked. In Seattle, unemployment benefits cut off after six months. In Scotland, and in that deprived neighbourhood, unemployment benefits are regarded not only as a primary source of income, but *as a human right* - and that neighbourhood's elected official makes that point, quite literally, in the Scottish Parliament. (Socialist Party, of course) In Seattle, a job crisis is a software maker laying off MA-level staff who then get scooped up by other tech companies. In Scotland, the job crisis is that one out of three people have never worked a day in their life. Literally.
So the MD was pushing all this touchy-feely American garbage on an ghetto neighbourhood in Scotland, and not able to comprehend why I objected so vehemently to it. Scotland is NOT Seattle. The problems in Scotland are NOT the same as the ones in Seattle. And what, in God's name, made this man think that it was even FEASIBLE to just transplant the system wholesale with no comprehension of how American society really works, and how the things which people base their entire lives on here literally do not exist there.
After I lost my job I had coffee with the chairwoman of the board and she confirmed to me that the reason I was hired in the first place was because the MD assumed that being American, I would just sing along from the same evangelical hymn book of touchy-feeliness. Not because I was the best qualified or most enthusiastic: because I was American, so I must be into that sort of stuff, of course.
From the start, the then-managing director - this English prep school twit who clearly had no idea that he was gay (you know the type) went on and on about this fact finding trip he'd done to the States, visiting community development and get-people-into-work type agencies in Chicago and Seattle. He'd never had an original thought in his life and came back singing about how we were going to do everything that the Seattle agency was doing, right down to copying their web site.
And this was where I first put my foot down and made a stand that he and the #2 (Lady Macbeth) absolutely could not comprehend.
What they just didn't get is that in a community development organisation in Seattle, you have 1) 36 churches per neighbourhood offering the services which are all state run and taxpayer funded here, down to babysitting; that 2) the most "deprived" people in Seattle just got off a boat and don't know how to read or write their own language, much less English - their problem is not that they left school and had a baby at 14 as a conscious decision; and most importantly - 3) that the US is NOT A WELFARE STATE.
They absolutely could not comprehend that the basic starting point that Seattle's "deprived" began from bears no resemblance in any way to the only starting point that they were used to, being the Scottish one. Since the Clinton era reforms, you can't get benefits for more than, what, two years. In Scotland, "incapacity benefit" is given for 17 years with no checkups or breaks and no questions asked. In Seattle, unemployment benefits cut off after six months. In Scotland, and in that deprived neighbourhood, unemployment benefits are regarded not only as a primary source of income, but *as a human right* - and that neighbourhood's elected official makes that point, quite literally, in the Scottish Parliament. (Socialist Party, of course) In Seattle, a job crisis is a software maker laying off MA-level staff who then get scooped up by other tech companies. In Scotland, the job crisis is that one out of three people have never worked a day in their life. Literally.
So the MD was pushing all this touchy-feely American garbage on an ghetto neighbourhood in Scotland, and not able to comprehend why I objected so vehemently to it. Scotland is NOT Seattle. The problems in Scotland are NOT the same as the ones in Seattle. And what, in God's name, made this man think that it was even FEASIBLE to just transplant the system wholesale with no comprehension of how American society really works, and how the things which people base their entire lives on here literally do not exist there.
After I lost my job I had coffee with the chairwoman of the board and she confirmed to me that the reason I was hired in the first place was because the MD assumed that being American, I would just sing along from the same evangelical hymn book of touchy-feeliness. Not because I was the best qualified or most enthusiastic: because I was American, so I must be into that sort of stuff, of course.