So, the week has been like this…
(Teresa Burritt, Frog Applause: her blog)
__
And the impulse is to react like this…
(Brian Crane, Pickles, via Gocomics.com)
Which is probably safer than imitating Shaun Ellis and going to live with wolves…
This post is in: Open Threads, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own
So, the week has been like this…
(Teresa Burritt, Frog Applause: her blog)
__
And the impulse is to react like this…
(Brian Crane, Pickles, via Gocomics.com)
Which is probably safer than imitating Shaun Ellis and going to live with wolves…
Comments are closed.
Yutsano
Why I love Dawgs, even British ones. Thanks for the Guardian link AL it led me to this story. :)
PS will try to get a picture of Jefferson my uncle’s new guide dog. He is a total beaut.
Ailuridae
@Yutsano:
Woot!
spudvol
Lobo Loco
S. cerevisiae
Yeah, the pickles cartoon strikes a little close to home. Can someone get me a beer?
Linda Featheringill
A day off!
Half way through the probationary period of the new job. It is getting better and is no longer unmitigated hell just getting through the day.
I really, really don’t know if I can come up to their production standards, though.
morzer
Well, having kicked Comcast to the kerb yesterday, today is marked down for our liberation by the RCN Rebel Alliance. If any Comcast executives are listening, thanks for being such total jerks and losing two hitherto loyal customers for good.
morzer
@Linda Featheringill:
What job are you probationing, so to speak? If it’s not impolite to ask.
Cat Lady
Snowbound outdoor cats held hostage in house day 5; tensions are mounting. Need moar catnip (for cats). Also.
Maude
@morzer:
What awful things did they do? Comcast around here can be hit or miss in getting help with a problem. I don’t have Comcast and am glad.
morzer
@Maude:
They decided, without warning, to suspend our account five days ago. Five calls and three online chats (using a friend’s wireless rig) to various Comcast functionaries later, plus an engineer visit, we still don’t know why. We’ve been good customers for years (never an unpaid or late bill!) and given that we don’t visit dubious sites or download huge amounts of data, we are absolutely incandescent with rage. The engineer who came to our urban hell-hole shack said he’d never dealt with a suspension in about five years, and suddenly had three of them in two days.
Make of that what you will.
Linda Featheringill
@morzer:
Medical transcription.
morzer
@Linda Featheringill:
How does one medically transcribe? I am glad you aren’t stitching garments or in the radium mines!
Maude
@morzer:
I would go on a lovely rant about that if it happened to me. Comcast must be up to something to increase profits.
The telecomunications act in the 1990’s really made cable and all of it more expensive and prevented people from making choices on what company to use.
Linda Featheringill
@morzer:
LOL! I’m glad I’m not in the radium mines, too.
Medical transcription goes like this:
Somebody [usually a doctor] records a verbal report about a surgery or an office visit or whatever. Somebody else [like me] takes this recording and types it up, producing either a typed sheet of paper or a computer document. These reports are filed away in various ways and the next time that patient shows up, health care providers can check on his records and medical history.
Sometimes the record stays in the doctor’s office. Most of what I do stays within a single hospital, with access given to all the docs in that hospital. Some organizations, like the VA, have the means of sharing patient notes with other [VA] hospitals.
mr. whipple
@Linda Featheringill: Still jamming to the big band sound?
Linda Featheringill
@mr. whipple:
Hi.
I’m into ska this morning.
That is a good radio station you suggested, though.
stuckinred
@Linda Featheringill: My sister in LA took a beating on that. She lost her job as a loan officer and took a course that was paid for by the state. Being in higher ed I was concerned about this “proprietary” school and it turned out my concern was well founded. I am not trying to discourage you, just relating the experience.
morzer
@Maude:
The best bit is that when you call to complain, or try the online chat, they keep dropping in pre-canned adverts for online security etc while assuring you that they value you as a customer. Even when we called to cancel the service, they still babbled on about how they valued us and would we like to try their online security package. The response was very terse on our end. The online chat people seem to be from the Philippines, and were nice, but clueless. We tried calling “Customer Security Assurance” which was where supposedly all would be made clear, but no-one was ever home, and the regular customer service were unable to see anything on our account or to do anything except refer us to the eternally un-present CSA.
Heaven only knows what Comcast wants to achieve by this, but Hell will have to hit about minus 200 degrees for us to give them another chance.
Anyway, RCN has a cheaper package and better speed (supposedly) so with any luck as of about 2 pm today we should have our own connection and be free to surf the cyberworld once more.
morzer
@Linda Featheringill:
That sounds more than a little exhausting. What rate of production do they demand?
Currants
@Linda Featheringill: So nice to hear! The first few weeks sounded really disheartening. And there’s more daylight in the coming weeks, so that’s a plus, too. Can’t wait until it’s still daylight when I get home–THAT will be grand.
mr. whipple
@Linda Featheringill:
It’s really cool. Part of a HS vocational program. When the kids are on, it’s pretty funny. I don’t care much for the ‘sweet’ types of big band, but when they are kicking it out it can be really good.
Linda Featheringill
@stuckinred:
Yes, I wouldn’t think of paying huge amounts of money for training. I got my training from working in doctor’s offices forever. Then when I wound up unemployed at age 59 because my job was outsourced to South Africa [!], I went to work for a transcription company. This transcription company ran into bad times and had to let some people go, including me. So I was 66 years old and unemployed. I put in applications EVERYWHERE and these folks actually offered me a job.
Transcription used to pay well but now I am competition with workers in India, etc. and the pay has gone way down. I would not recommend it to a person just coming in.
I never was the fastest person on earth but I am accurate. People seem to like the way I do operative reports because I can handle the technical nonsense involved.
Now if I can only persuade the new bosses that I am too charming and young and beautiful to live without. :-)
stuckinred
@Linda Featheringill: Go get em!
Linda Featheringill
@morzer:
It works out to about 15,000 words a day. At the old job, I could do about 10,000 a day. With all the new ways of doing things, this has gone way down and is only now slowly rising.
We’ll see.
alwhite
Thanks for the link to Frog Blog – looks like a really fun collection of almost random junk, much of which made me smile. I am bookmarking that.
Here is a very oddball comic strip that gets carried in some newspapers. Its silly and senseless but it usually makes me laugh:
http://comics.com/brewster_rockit/
Linda Featheringill
To everybody:
Thanks for the encouragement. I appreciate it.
mai naem
@Linda Featheringill: You should go into coding. I have a friend whose son has been doing it for 3 yrs and makes $85K and he had no experience at all to begin with.
Speaking of medical stuff, does Reince Preibus not sound like a proctological instrument? “Make sure you autoclave the Reince Preibus twice, this guy had the cooties and then some.”
morzer
@mai naem:
What variety of coding specifically?
JPL
After the Falcons beating last night, I’m almost afraid to admit that I’ll be cheering for the Bears and the Patriots today.
@Linda Featheringill: It sounds as though each week is a little better and that is a good thing. You go girl.
morzer
@mai naem:
More like Rinse Previous to me. Now why would the GOP want to wipe away the last 30 years, hmm?
alwhite
@Linda Featheringill:
Thats gotta be a tough job particularly with all the Latin & jargon doctors use. Good luck & I hope you can get through.
I lost my last 2 perm jobs through contractions & consolidation & have been a ‘contractor’ since. One job was for a very large intellectual property law firm, they had their transcriptions done in India. Then I had a gig with Target Corp. Their managers actually had a goal for moving jobs to their India operations & part of my job was to train my replacements there how to run the process I created. The masters of the universe are killing the American worker.
My current gig might lead to a perm position, but it is the dullest, mind numbing work possible. For over 2 months I was not given _any_ work at all to do but I had to look busy. While I would kill to be hired on there I also think I would cry a lot. At 60 crying is better than unemployment.
jurassicpork
Today’s my 52nd birthday so I figured it was high time to make a top ten list of why now sucks to be a baby boomer.
Oh, and GO PATS!!!!!!
Odie Hugh Manatee
Played an online game with the daughter this AM (Left4Dead2) and a couple of ‘griefers’ came on and tried to make life miserable for us. Too bad for them that we own the server and have SourceMod and MetaMod installed. We killed them, revived them, killed them again, stuck one in a room and released five ‘supertanks’ in it, let one get smoked and then bitchslapped them to high heaven, put the other in a house and firebombed their ass and so on. One was spitting out racial epithets and trying to insult us the whole time, all we did was laugh at him and fuck with him even more.
Once they ragequit we banned their asses permanently. It’s nice to have your own gameserver in situations like that! Our cable provider allows inbound port 80 so running a home server 24/7 is really nice. They will remain unnamed so we don’t lose that nice feature. Great speed (20/2), they stay up almost all of the time and the price is very fair.
morzer
@jurassicpork:
Happy birthday. Or less melancholy birthday, whichever is more appropriate.
Linda Featheringill
@alwhite:
Right. I’m also cussing a lot these days. I used to never drop f-bombs but I’m polishing my cursing skills.
Ija
So I’m a bit late reading this William Galston article calling for easier involuntary commitment for the mentally ill. I understand the frustration regarding Jared Loughner, but his prescriptions seem a little over the top, especially that part about scrapping the requirement that a mentally ill person constitute a danger to himself or other people for incarceration. And this part of the article
seems like a winger rant. I’m not really familiar with Galston’s work. Is he a right winger of some sort? Why is he being published in TNR?
Edit: I now realize that last part is a stupid question, of course. It’s TNR, what else could we expect.
Linda Featheringill
@morzer:
This has to do with billing and sending your invoice to the insurance company in a language that the insurance company’s computer can understand. I am not sure how the present system was developed but I think it’s a lot more complex than it has to be. Anyway, you can’t just walk in off the street and do it. You have to undergo some training.
Ija
I googled Galston, apparently he was a former advisor of President Clinton. So apparently not a right winger. Just arguing like one.
SiubhanDuinne
happy birthday, Jurassic Pork! I really identified with a lot of points on your list (I’m 68, so the celebs-I’ve-never-heard-of thing is even more pronounced for me). I remember in 1960 when JFK was elected. He was just a couple of months olderthan my mother (both born in 1917) and I remember vividly how disturbed she was by his youth. I’m older than Clinton, Shrub and Obama, and unless McCain has some kind of miraculous political rebirth (which FSM forbid) I will be older than every future US president for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t exactly say it sucks, but it’s kind of a sobering thought.
Linda F, congratulations and hang in there!
mai naem
@morzer: I am not sure, I believe he works for a place that farms out the work. I don’t think he works for a practice or facility directly.
BTW, I thought that speech recognition software had affected the amount of work medical transcriptions get too. I don’t believe its just outsourcing. I am just wondering at what time CEOs and management are going to figure out where Americans are going to fund their(CEOs) salaries. When 60 percent of the healthcare dollar is coming from the government, how do they think a radiologist is going to pay his taxes when his job is being outsourced. And the dental crowns and prosthetics, and medical supplies(next time you get simple bandages look at the label it may surprise you.) So much fucking short term thinking.
I get a little concerned about all the 50 plus people losing there jobs and at the same time a lot of them are depending on SS just when congress is talking about making cuts to it.
WyldPirate
@jurassicpork:
Happy bday, jurassicpork! My 52d is tomorrow.
mai naem
@Linda Featheringill: The current system was developed at Yale in the 60s. TAL had a story about it a long time ago.
@SiubhanDuinne: I would have never guessed that you are 68. You come across like somebody in the 40s/early 50s tops. I was totally surprised when I found out Digby was a woman. I always always assumed Digby was a male. I have a feeling most of us would be surprised would be with each other if we met IRL. lol. I think Markos comes across quite whiny IRL vs. his online personality.
Oh and happy b-day Jurassic pork.
Linda Featheringill
@mai naem:
Speech recognition software is present and growing. The finished product has to be “edited”, both during the time the software is “learning” and the rest of the time because there will always be some stuff that the program hasn’t heard of.
I haven’t worked with speech recognition but would like to because that is probably the future of the profession. However, it pays about half as much as actual typing and so you have to do twice as much.
You can’t win. Sigh.
This technology is probably not cost effective for a stand alone doc’s office but for a facility like a hospital with lots of dictation, it can deliver real savings.
morzer
@Ija:
Galston has some Blue Dog affinities, for sure. He’s part of the group that runs this site:
http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/
mclaren
@morzer:
The claim that you “dont’t download a lot of data” can’t hold up to scrutiny unless you know exactly how much data you use. Most people don’t.
For example: do you watch YouTube? Then you download craploads of data. Do you use Netflix streaming? Then you download boatloads of data. Do you play World of Warcraft? Then you use megatons of data. Do you watch hulu? Then you use ridiculous amounts of data.
Unless you can back up your claim by showing exactly how many bytes of data you downloaded last month, chances are you blew through too many gigabytes and never realized it.
It’s incredibly easy to do, especially with services like Netflix streaming.
gelfling545
It is very interesting to see the ages of some of the regular commentors here. Being of a certain age myself, I assumed I was just a random old person who was listening in on the young folks, many of whom were wise beyond their years.
mclaren
@gelfling545:
Get off my lawn, you kids! (MmmmMMMMMMmmm…gelfling TASTY! MMMmmmMMMMMM!)
SiubhanDuinne
@mai naem: Thanks! (And sorry it’s taken all day to reply — you’ll probably never see this! — but I’ve had trouble accessing BJ most of the day; assume others have too.) Years ago I worked in radio (on air) and I remember meeting someone once who blurted out: “Oh, I’m so disappointed! I always pictured you as a tall brunette!” (FTR, I am 5’2″ with mouse brown hair. Well, it’ grey tweed now, but at the time it was mouse brown.)
Steven Rockford
Is John OK, Anne?