ok, so I am not getting the babble time I had hoped for... I did get the babbling file down to 66 pages, which means more is coming out than is going in, but that also means, considering that I've popped at least thirty pages out recently, I am still babbling... it's just some of the least organized (and possibly most derivative) babbling I've done in years...

huge, I mean massive, apologies to anyone seeking an original thought...

what I will dump out tonight is some work babble because, well, it's time for some work babble... this may take more than one entry as work is more intricately amazing than usual and though I'm bound to leave out details being that I do not have time to actually sit and babble freely as I'd like, I'll try to cover the main fun and stupidity...

where do we begin? (to tell a story of how dumb a job can be?... wait, that's love story, start again)... work is ridiculous, but amusing... well, to me at least... others are losing hair and sleep and fretting a lot, but I'm just nodding my head and smiling...

I interface with government people now, do I need to say more?...

no seriously, the incompetence is awesome... breathtaking, even... people actually gasp when I read my emails... truth be told, for every hour I interact with government agencies I spend at least ten minutes documenting the interaction to cover myself and the hospital...

and I think I lose brain cells too, but then, I did enough recreational drugs in my time to have an ongoing stream, a cascading crash of death and rebirth in the brain cell department... cuz after all, any good Holywood movie afficianado knows we only use 3% of our brains and after burning out about 60%, I've still got at least 37% unused grey matter and if I turned on just 4% of that I'd be light years ahead of the norm by evolutionary standards... I mean, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to know that, right?...

Timothy Leary is not dead, by the way...

but he is still on the outside looking in

meanwhile, back to work... I've mentioned before that in my job, I turn children into numbers and feed them to big brother... well, to say it another way, I report data on clinical patient care and psychiatric measures to the government to prove we are worthy of getting money from the government to provide patient care that gets measured and give to me to report to the government to prove we are worthy of...

get the point?...

yes, this is your tax dollar at work... let's see, where to begin... well, I've already told you, maybe several times in different places, that the database I report to was shut down for rebuilding on July 1st... they were constantly having problems and complaints about it, so everyone cheered when they said they'd fix it...

come September 1st, when it was supposed to come back online, nothing... we apologize for any inconvenience... it didn't actually open for data again until the end of September, for a day, maybe, before it crashed and that process has repeated several times and they are still trying to work bugs out as Xmas approaches... from the chatter in the data-head circles, most agencies and hospitals have not been able to access the database or upload much, if any of their data...

and then, as if the government bureacrasy couldn't get complicated enough, our hopsital added to the mess... the hospital was bought and changed ownership on September 1st... the new corportate parent, in an effort to establish it's power or something (more like a tax dodge, probably), told the government it was applying for a new provider ID so we'd be a new entity all theirs...

so naturally, the government, who's job it is to protect the welfare of the people, in this case, the kids in a psychiatric hospital many of whom are wards of, you guessed it, the government, now sees the hospital as a completely different entity... what this means is that all data (in other words, all patients and treatment) prior to September 1st does not exist for the government... they only want data from September 1st as if the course of treatment for all the kids to be dated on or after September 1st because the kids were obviously in a different hospital before September 1st and...

everybody say, huh?...

so no matter when the kid was actually admitted to our care, we pretend that he or she was admitted on September 1st and who cares what happened to them before... so ultimately, the data we will submit for 2006 on hundreds of kids becomes meaningless and proves nothing and helps no one, but just like that Jessica Simpson look-a-like in that TV commercial, they want it...

if only they were as cute as...

nevermind...

where were we?... ah yes, double the complications and double the fun, right?... well what's that you say?... double or nothing isn't good enough?... well let's add some more complication into the mix then, alright?...

and then, I started this position just after September 1st... I sent in my applications and fingerprints and six quarts of blood (and the kidney and eye and recording of the backwards bill of rights in Armenian, but that we'll get to later) and waited for the government to process my application so I could proudly be a clinical data specialist for the great old US of A...

the short version is that the government finally processed my paperwork and gave me access to their database on November 20th... the longer version will probably flow out in the next entry... I did sneak into the database one time on my officemate's ID and in my one walk through of the website (that would have been November 2nd... and the data continued to pile up, remember?), I found several errors in the records they set up for our hospital and told the government liaison about it...

he thanked me in an email, which is part of the CYA process we'll get into later...

what has become hysterically obvious in the past three and a half months on this job that the government liaison has very little understanding of the meaning of the data or the process he is supposed to be in charge of and no empathy or connection for the patients he is supposed to be looking out for... ultimately, I can make up numbers and he'd never know the difference...

every week they fix more bugs or upgrade something else (at least that's what they say they are doing) and access has to be granted again, so I did not have access again until this week when I find the government liaison did not fix the errors I reported to him on November 2nd and I began suspecting that he wasn't reading my emails...

this wouldn't be a problem, except that on Friday, that would be December eighth, the government liaison answered questions I asked the day I finally got access back in November... answers I needed before I could start uploading any data... the answers were simply that no patient existed in our hospital prior to September first and to hell with what that does to the reports of the outcomes of treatment for the kids...

not a problem, you say, well, not if the next bit of information didn't come along with it... see, unfortunately, the government liaison was finally responding to my questions because he had something else to tell me... apparently there is a fiscal year deadline, December 31st, for entry of all data for 2006... if the data is not entered by December 31st, the hospital is in violation of law and out of compliance with the contract that keeps government money flowing into the hospital... now he tells us...

yes, he picked a fine time to tell us, didn't he Lucille...

I estimate that if the database is accessible from now on (which would be quite a new) and if the internet, my computer, and the hospital network never has a glitch (highly improbable) and if the errors on the site are fixed and I start entering data tomorrow and if I devote six hours a day non-stop to that and that alone (and am late with the other data reports due each month), it would take approximately twenty-two work days to catch up (and that doesn't include any patients admitted or discharged between now and December 31st)...

but wait, that's just the synopsis, there's the slightly more bloated (though still not actually complete and probably not all that coherent) version in the very next entry... feel free to skip it if you've had enough government madness...

. o O ( NOTES ARE THE NEW HAPPY PILL ) O o .
(just let me know you were here)