Bad

Jan 22, 2022 by Elizabeth 5 Comments

I haven’t been nice. I’ve been horrible. This morning I woke up thinking about it.

I’m a nasty piece of work.

Yesterday I blew my top.

In our medical practice we have a complicated procedure to get an appointment with a doctor. In the old days one picked up the phone at the time of one’s choosing, talked to the receptionist who is now called by some other fancy name and made an appointment to see the doctor. It was either urgent or for sometime in the future. But in these modern times, one has to enter the ‘race’.

If you need a doctor urgently or even futurely, you have to join the queue at 8 o’clock in the morning exactly, when you will be told there are 9, 14 or 20 people ahead of you waiting in the same queue to speak to the receptionist. While you wait you have practice notices repeated eternally and you listen to music that makes your heart race and ratchets up your adrenaline, pumping annoyance hormones into every cell.

This procedure can take up to 45 minutes or longer by which time you have succumbed to the emergency that you are trying to get a doctor for.

Yesterday I did all that and the doctor, who I do not know and who really knows nothing about me, phoned twice on my mobile phone despite instructions to phone on my landline. He simply cancelled the appointment because I hadn’t answered.

When I got hold of the receptionist again, she said I’d have to phone tomorrow at 8 o’clock to make a new appointment.

That’s when the shit hit the fan. Me being the shit.

After she grudgingly agreed to get another doctor to phone me, she asked the fatal question.

“What do you want to see the doctor about?”

So I told her.

In shocking detail.

For a long time.

About as long as a consultation.

Mr Furlong was listening.

Afterwards he said

“They’re only doing what they’ve been told to do.”

This morning as I woke, I mulled over the situation. I overdid things yesterday. That’s bad.