gravity circus: February 2016

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Delivering babies

I'm not gonna lie, delivering babies is a pretty awesome job.

It's only part of what I do, but when it is good, it is so very good.

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I talked to a friend who is moving to a consultative kind of job. It's her dream job in many ways, but it is the kind of job that usually doesn't involve any more delivering of babies. She said to me, when we were talking about it: "I bargained my way into some clinical time on L&D", she said. "They couldn't believe I wanted to be on Labor and Delivery"

"I get it," I said. "Of course. How can you not be on L&D? How can you be a credible consultant and tell people what to do when you're not in the trenches with them? And L&D is where everything good and everything bad happens."

"You got it. Everything good and everything bad." she said. "Next time I'm bringing you to the contract negotiation."

Sunday, February 14, 2016

Exactly how many Google calendars?

All this time I was jealous of people who had that expensive call-schedule-management software. Every time I was the subject of or dealt with a schedule snafu, the Bearded Economist would say: "You know, this is the kind of thing that computers are really good at."

And so I envied that expensive schedule management software. I thought you could plug in a bunch of rules (like, say, that doctors can't be in two places at once; or that doctors can't work if they just worked a 24 hour overnight shift). Then you could copy in your holiday arrangements and let the magic happen. In a most beautiful world, it might notice if you signed in a for a shift that you weren't signed up for, and ask you what was going on. I bemoaned my 19 Google calendars* and the constant view and review required to assess for mistakes, and then stomach-curdling feeling when often, an entirely different mistake had occurred anyway.

Anyway, I was talking to a friend with that fancy software, and you know what? It's not actually that amazing. It's not programmable. It doesn't think. It's mostly just a shared place to keep the calendar, the calendar that a fallible human still has to make. It has some great associated features, like the ability to text or call someone directly from the schedule or other such thing.

Anyway, it's not actually that much better than my 21 Google calendars**, is what I'm saying. And the mistakes I try so hard to avoid, as a human, are not yet avoidable by obtaining a robot overlord. So I feel a bit better now.

* And counting; I'm spending a ridiculous amount of time considering whether to split one of these calendars into 3. On a weekend. No, everything's going just fine, why do you ask?

**I went for it.