Orientated

I am going to preface this with sincerely saying that all of the people I met today were very nice. I think that working at this facility will be great….eventually.

Let’s follow that with the fact that I didn’t realize the Public Health Service was technically a branch of the military, the Indian Health Service is an off shoot of that, and go from there.

Holy cow.

If ever I doubted the rigmarole of bureaucracy, my eyes have been opened.

Today was my first day on the job. Except that the people who were supposed to run orientation weren’t there. So other people stepped in after over an hour of standing around wondering what I was supposed to do. After sitting through abbreviated orientation lectures, we were informed that we would have to come back in two weeks for “real” orientation.  Then I got the tour, and gave myself an extended tour as I went from ER to IT to Employee Health to Registration to IT to Registration to Admin to ER to Lunch to ER to Registration to IT to Employee Health to IT to Admin to IT to ER. I ended up needing two copies of the same information to give to different people for different files. I was fingerprinted (any of you contemplating asking me to help you rob a bank…sorry, I’m out) after nearly 3 hours of wandering from department to department, phone calls, forms, other forms, more phone calls. And I got computer access from a woman in an office with more paper than technology who had to switch a single computer monitor between two computers because her additional monitor was being used in the OR. (no, I’m not kidding. Apparently the OR had technical difficulties)

When all was said and [finally!] done, I got to go to the ER, where I couldn’t technically do anything because my fingerprints aren’t cleared yet. Tomorrow I get to scrub up and actually work. Maybe. Hopefully.

Today was not all frustrations. I’m actually excited about the charting software. Apparently it’s been around for almost thirty years, but it’s been updated along the way and is not only logical, but user friendly (ask me again in a couple of weeks if I hold to this).  I got to go home over lunch break and see Rocky and George (who were all too eager to check out my empty yogurt cup).

When I got home this evening, I was approached by a stereotypical inebriated individual who regaled me with tales of bullriding while asking for spare change.

After extracting myself from that situation, I came home to type this on my non-connected laptop in hopes of transferring the text to my phone and finding some miraculous data connection reliable enough to post it. Rocky and George are alternatively playing hide-n-seek – one hides under the bed while the other bounces around on top of the bed trying to figure out how his adversary disappeared.