Date:	2007-08-22 13:29
Subject:	A few hints from the workplace
Security:	Public
Mood:	dorky

1.  When you tell your admin "I have about a hundred slides for you to work with", and all you mean is that you want her to keep said 100+ slides on file...TELL HER!  Otherwise she gets a little cranky and assumes that your 90% retired mind has finally slipped into dementia if you think she's going to drop everything to deal with you.
2.  When you're the only male researcher in the lab (after the customary end of fellowship exodus in which the other 3 men have left) and you want to retain use of Big Jim and the Twins, let the admin doing the ordering know you're run out of something.  She'll order what you need, she likes doing her job.  Don't leave a huge empty space on the shelf - the other researchers will get pissy and start placing stat orders.  They know you're doing it, and the cultural incompetency excuse stopped being effective when they learned you got your PhD on US soil.  This process, in turn, will make the admin pissy because she is now spending $25.00 in shipping for the $4.00 bottle of stuff.  Believe it or not, she is keeping track of expenses!
3.  To all callers:  Yes, Dr. C. is on vacation.  Feel free to make lame jokes, the admin is good with one-line comebacks.  Don't insult her intelligence, she is capable to taking phone messages and relaying to Dr. C. that you've insulted her.  Dr. C. is very protective of his admin.
4.  To all internal callers:  Yes, Dr. U. is out of the office for the rest of the week.  Yes, the admin realizes he's been gone since the 8th.  She also realizes that she can pull up the notification email she sent out upon his leaving outlining this, and has no problems pulling up said email and forwarding it to you to show you that yes, you WERE notified.  No, Dr. U. is not reading emails.  No, Dr. U. is not having a good time on the golf course - he's working 18 hours a day in a missionary clinic in Nigeria, giving something back.
5.  To the other admins:  The admin who edits/creates divisional web pages will take your request for edits, until they conflict with orders from the clinical chief.  The clinical chief has more degrees than you do, more experience than you do, more liability than you do, and makes 15 times what you do.  He wins.

Well, if one good thing comes out of all the bullshit going on over in LJ-land - I will finally break my addiction to brown colas.  I can't stand the taste of diet Coke - and I have vowed not to buy any more Pepsi products.  I'm sure my MD will have a good laugh over the fact that my reason for giving up the stuff is politically based and not based on health factors.  Ah well - there's always tea.

I had tried getting folks on my friend's list to read this journal instead, and hopefully now people will take it a little more seriously.  If not, I guess I can just always use Facebook for the more newsy stuff (a few of my cousins are linked to me there, so I keep everything comparatively clean and on the up-and-up).  I don't know if I can totally ditch the LJ just yet...I may just link to entries from here.  I'm just not real anxious to put anything up over there.

So, what's been going on...

I celebrated my one-year anniversary at my job at the hospital.  My boss got a promotion, which means my workload has doubled.  This move, though, should translate into some good things career-wise for me - I can make some conjectures, but I have no definitive information just yet. 

I'm moving in less than two weeks!  YAAAAAY!  I'm not going very far - just to Cambridge.  It's a much bigger place.  Right now, my wife and I share a two-room converted attic.  The new place is a two bedroom apartment with a huge kitchen and an okay-sized living room.  We're on a third-floor again, but since it is a tenement-style building as opposed to a house, the stairwells and doorways are much easier to navigate.  The T is a block away, as is Mass Ave.  There is a library close by, lots of shops (including the co-op and Wild Harvest), and a nice playground for L not too far away.

Oh yeah - the wedding went very well.  :)  (I'm going to fish through my LJ and find the entry where I gave a wrap-up - will post it ASAP.Honeymoon will probably happen next summer.  A wedding announcement should be in Bay Windows over the next couple of weeks, and I will link to it :)

Hi all,

I've moved my journal here in the wake of all that is going on over at LJ.  I mean, I'm all for protecting the children (I have a daughter about to turn five) - but I am 30 and feel no need to be protected by anyone.  (Isn't that why I have a back button?)  Anyway, that's all I am going to say about it, because folks who are much more eloquent than I have already done so over at LJ (and lots of other places as well). My LJ is damsel_ophelia.

I'll be migrating my LJ journal over here (and backdating the entries).  Anything that was friends-only there will be friends-only here.

Oh yes, for clarification - I generally only use initials for folks who I do not want to identify by name in my journal (to protect my privacy or theirs), and I will only identify someone by their  username if given permission, so knowing who the following folks are might be helpful...

L is my daughter.
E is my fiancee...in less then three weeks she'll be my WIFE!!! (SQUEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!) 
M is the biggest pain in the ....err, I mean my ex-husband, and L's dad.

So that's about it, for now...