With time on my hands

I'm loving that even only working 3-4 days a week my paycheque is about the same as when I was tied down at the store. I love that when my shift ends at 5pm - I can drop everything and go at 5pm, not 5:15, not 5:30 -__-"

Anyhow - I was reminded of why I took up my retail job in the first place. It wasn't so much for the money as it was to get out of the house and away from my crazyass mother. Things will definitely be changing since I'll have to start thinking about "grown up" things like bills, rent, groceries, etc.

With more time on my hands I've found myself wandering around shopping and mallcrawling a lot more. I bought myself a lightweight portable music stand today, as well as a couple of tops from MEXX. MAC has a new collection called 'A Muse' releasing tomorrow and it looks really pretty, but I doubt I'll buy much from it because it consists mostly of the mineralized items like the ones from Rococo (summer 04), and I wasn't fond of them because I couldn't depot them.

story about my day at work yesterday

I had a some strange race related events happen at work yesterday. First I happened to answer a phone call from a lady who had an appointment for next week and wanted to confirm it and make sure she'd have enough time to get out in time for work. It turns out the girl who booked her appointment (and I do know who booked it, I can check the login) only booked 3 out of the 4 tests that she needed. The patient was a little annoyed, but I was able to find her a time for the missing examination. I asked the lady if she remembered who she spoke to and if she recalled what she said to that receptionist. She replied 'It was one of them Chinese girls. I could barely understand what she was saying. What's your name, dear? I should ask for you next time I call because you're not Chinese' LOL! I could only laugh because 1) duh, I'm Chinese, although the lady on the phone didn't believe me; 2) the receptionist who originally booked her appointment isn't Chinese. Not that race has anything to do with it, but she's also Canadian like me so there's no way that she would have had any hint of an asian accent. Oh well, people are silly.

Next situation - at 1:40 a lady called me and said she had an appointment for 2:40 and needed to cancel it. She was booked for 2 tests and I knew that if I rescheduled her she would have to wait until the end of August because we are so fully booked. So I asked her what had happened and why didn't she call us earlier. The patient then asked me what time it was, and what time her appointment was scheduled for and said "OK, I'll try to make it" and hung up on me.

When she arrived at 2:45 (already late) she had forgotten her health card and her requisition form from her doctor. It's not an unusual situation - it happens all the time. If it's a patient with a file with us, we can just call the Ministry of Health hotline and verify that the health card is valid - it's not a big deal at all and I can do it in 30 seconds since I have the codes memorized. For the referral form, we are technically supposed to happen but I know that shit happens and it doesn't seem fair to have to reschedule a patient 3 weeks later especially when they drank 5 cups of water, or if they already waited 4 weeks to get an evening/ Saturday appointment. In these cases I'll tell the patients that I'll do them a favour and we'll do the exam, but until I have the requisition in my hands our radiologist will not even look at their case. This makes the point if their visit pointless if they can't get a report, so they always get it back to me by the next day at the latest. Worst case scenario is we can call their referring doctor and ask them to fax us a copy - but I hate doing that. It is a hassle for the doctor's office and it's a hassle for us because we are waiting for the form before we can go ahead with the exams.

Anyhow, I wasn't at the front desk at the time when the patient arrived, but one of the other receptionists agreed to call her doctor's office and get her form faxed over. So we solved the small kink with this particular lady. At this point another patient who had been sitting in the waiting room came up to the front desk and declared that this was unfair treatment. (Let me add that the lady who was late was of African descent, and the angry lady was caucasian - both were in the 60's) She claimed that if she had forgotten her form we would have sent her home and that because of the other woman's skin colour she was given preferential treatment.

Yikes. That was one can of worms that I wasn't going to get involved with, but it made me think. If someone has racist ideas in their head already, they will look to see things to support their single-minded ideas even if there's nothing to see. We were being accomodating to one lady, and somehow managed to piss of another. I don't know - you just can't win!