What a day!

Today started off kind of slow, but ended with a rush. I got up this morning and went to Michael's to get some scrapbooking stuff. Mom brought over a lot of stuff last week that had to do with Steve's family history, but it was in one of those antique "magnetic" photo albums. The stickiness has long disappeared, but that stuff isn't acid free and will eventually eat away the newspaper articles and anything else made of paper, so I want to get it all scanned and the originals put in another scrapbook. Yeah, well, I managed to drop waaaaay too much money, but it's for a worthy cause, right?

Steve called from Nowhere, Wisconsin, this morning. He's so far out in the boonies there's no cell service, which we discovered last night when he drove to the highest hill he could find and we still couldn't manage to stay connected. They drove into Hayward this morning, so he called from there. He's not having a good hunting vacation. (oh, too bad...) Sunday was really hot and humid (about 85 degrees in October in Northern Wisconsin... odd weather all around). Last night storms came through so it rained all day today. Just pretend today is still Monday, okay? I've been up since about 10:30 a.m. and it's still Monday to me! He should be back on Wednesday or Thursday.

I started work on time today, but since I'm the only one home, I still have to deal with the dogs. The first thing they did when I let them out around 4, was to tip over a garbage can and spread the contents through the entire back yard. They have never done that before, ever! It took me nearly an hour to get that mess all cleaned up. We had an inch of rain last night ourselves, so the driveway in the back yard was a muddy mess and I'm slogging through it picking up trash... I was not a happy camper!

It felt like I had just sat down and started working again when the doorbell rang. I peeked out of my blinds, but didn't see anybody, so I wasn't going to answer until it rang again. Which, of course, it did. Turns out it was the neighbor girl. She's a junior in high school - a really nice, polite girl (amazing!), so I'm glad I answered the door and got to know her a bit, but she had gotten off work a couple hours early and no one was home and she didn't have her key with her. I let her use my cell phone - and ended up giving her a ride to her aunt's house when she couldn't find anyone to come get her. That shot another hour. Too bad I don't get good Samaritan points for not getting any work done while I did that. Working on production kind of sucks in that way.

Consequently, I spent the evening feeling like I was chasing my tail and not getting much accomplished. Plus, our stupid transcription platform took a dive again this weekend. It did the same thing about 6 months ago, jobs would load into our queue, but then they wouldn't open and we'd get a message saying the file was corrupt. We contacted Arrendale, who developed the software we use, they fixed the files, rebooted our server and all was well. We had problems with about 10 jobs total. Well, not this time! I guess it started about 5:30 or so on Friday with corrupt jobs coming up right and left. Someone contacted Arrendale and they rebooted the server, but for some reason they couldn't fix the corrupt files this time. What a freaking mess! We lost over 30 jobs and some of them were from consulting physicians who only come up to Fremont a couple of times a month. All those jobs have to be redictated. Let me tell you, doctors are never happy when they have to redictate anything, and a screw up of this magnitude, oh brother... I'm sure glad I'm not the one who had to call the doctors and tell them their jobs had been lost. When they do something stupid like cut themselves off they're mad enough, but when it's our fault they have to redo something... It is ug-ly! This platform that we use from this company absolutely sucks. We have nothing but problems with it, usually not to such an extent, but it just seems like something is constantly not working right. One of our voice cards when bad about a year ago and we got the last one they have left. They told us if another one goes out we'll have to get a new system! What kind of BS is that? Pardon my French. Our MIS manager says this company is head and shoulders above Dictaphone, so he won't switch. I beg to differ. Granted I'm only on the user side, not the MIS side, but I've worked for a long time with Dictaphone set ups and with quite a few different companies, and I've never had to deal with such crap in all my life. If you call Dictaphone there's someone there 24 hours a day to help you out. This company says they have a 24 hour help desk, but after about 6 at night you have to leave a message and if you're lucky they call you back within an hour or 2. I've even had one of their help desk employees tell me he didn't know what was wrong and I'd have to wait until morning. You just don't do that in hospitals., sometimes you have to have a report within an hour or two. Idiots. And we just budgeted for an upgrade from this company in 2008. Hopefully the upgrade works better than the version we have now.

Then, to top it all off the slug who's supposed to be working 8:30-4 didn't work tonight. Personally, I could care less if she works or not. The 6 weeks she was off for surgery went great because I knew I was the only one working, so I allocated the highest priority work and went from there. She's supposed to be the one making sure all the consults and histories are done for the upcoming surgeries, which of course she can't do when she's not working... If I leave them because there's other priority work to do, thinking she's working and will catch them later (because it's her freaking job) and she doesn't show up then the surgeries can be held up while they wait for the work to be done. It all sounds very simple - I should just do everything, right? LOL! Really when there's 2 people the work can be divided and one doesn't get hammered more than the other with STAT work. I just want to know when she's going to work. Apparently, I can't go by the schedule. All this is especially frustrating because we just got an e-mail about a week ago from our supervisor telling us that people were getting too lax about working their regular hours and then this sloth works whenever she feels like it, of course that e-mail can't be referring to her... Oy... I'm not patient.

Oh, and then Bob lost his billfold Saturday and it never turned up. He canceled his credit cards, but his VA card with his SSN was in there too, so I spent about an hour trying to explain why they could call Equifax, or one of the other credit agencies to flag his account in case someone applies for a credit in his name. Mom kept telling me that he cancelled his cards and I kept trying to explain it didn't have anything to do with the cards he already had... That was enough to make me tear my hair out. I finally got online and got the phone numbers and told them to just call with Bob's information and not to worry about it. Ergh... The phone rang about 5 minutes later with mom again, telling me that Steve's cousin had had a heart attack. Well, I certainly couldn't call Steve and tell him... I have no idea where he's at. Isn't it terrible that a few years ago I would have known where he was at, but we took for granted that his cell phone would work, so now I have no way of contacting him.

My old age is showing in other ways too. Tonight Meg asked me if Bob Devaney had coached football or basketball at Nebraska. Oh my gawd!

Oh, and her car is dead in the parking lot of Iowa Western. Sigh. As chance would have it, Steve has my car and she's NOT using mom's car to go to school. I hope she finds a ride because there's no way in God's green earth I'm going to be able to drive her to school at 6:15 a.m. (Insert maniacal laughter here.) Oh yeah, she better damn well have the money to get a new battery or whatever is wrong with it. This bank is closed!