BULLSH*T

I Had the Dumbest Job on God’s Green Earth and it Made a Pockmarked Whore Out of Me

A Story About Being a Failed Pre-Med

It wasn’t babysitting.

It wasn’t lake lifeguarding — or shoveling 5-gallon bucketloads of swan sh*t that never failed to reappear on the beach.

And it sure as hell wasn’t being a middle school-aged cleaning lady with my mom at a mortgage and loans office — people are dirty, y’all.

I once had the most pointless goddamned job ever. It was the least-favorite job of my adolescence. And it was at a hospital’s outpatient surgical center, of all places.

It was the spring of 2002, in the pollen orgy of suburban Detroit. I was just finishing my freshman year of college. I was still harboring pre-med delusions and thus needed a summer job that was at least tangentially related to medicine.

Enter: nepotism. And a higher education truism — it’s not who you know, it’s who you blow.

My dad’s then-girlfriend, Carol, was a doctor at a local hospital near where I was spending my summer. She’d tried to take me under her wing several times over the course of her and dad’s relationship — to little avail, as I was in all fairness a difficult teenager to win over.

I should clarify that I did not blow Carol.

But Carol helped me get my job at outpatient surgery. And if I had blown Carol, that would have made my summer a lot more eventful in the hookup department; my boyfriend was off training at USC and [**spoilers**] cheating on me the whole time with some pockmarked whore named Amber.

No, I’m not bitter! I went ahead and married that, and had six kids with him. And I’ve literally never even had a dream where I wrote an essay called

Amber E. is a Pockmarked Whore, by Lindy Vogel

And speaking of whores,

Julia J., I owe you a heartfelt apology for calling you a whore, throwing a basketball at your prizewinning African Violet while you were dating my dad, and loudly laughing at you for being a gardener. It must have been hard to be my dad’s first post-divorce girlfriend.

And to Carol, my dad’s second post-divorce girlfriend — I’m sorry I squandered the job opportunity you gave me.

Harold was my friend. My “work spouse,” if I’d been the Anna Nicole Smith type, and he the Strom Thurmond or whoever the hell Anna Nicole strategically smashed uglies with.

Harold was a volunteer at the surgical center’s front desk, where I worked as a paid employee every day for nine hours. He was in his eighties and had an awesome wholesomeness to him that was at the same time impish.

My job as a registrar’s assistant was to be the assistant to the regional manager of registering patients through the hospital’s computer system. This meant checking people in as they prepared to hand over their insurance cards, money, and lives to the people behind the hospital curtain.

I was supposed to keep track of everybody who checked in for surgery — but not by calling out their first names, last names, or other identifying information. No, no. I was supposed to write down little notes — on what the patient was wearing, what they looked like, etc.,— next to their name, then discreetly walk over and get them when it was their turn to go under the knife.

Privacy is important, no doubt. But my entire job was a a HIPAA-related headache. Patients were late; doctors were behind schedule; people’s information had been entered incorrectly and needed fixing; insurance companies gave everyone a bunch of bullsh*t. All of this was made needlessly hard by not being able to call someone’s name into the waiting area.

Surgery has enough complications without privacy clusterf*cks.

Plus, people hadn’t eaten or drank anything in awhile and were grumpy.

I hated it.

Still, I had fun with my favorite colleague. Besides, everyone knows that all the best people are named Harold. There’s Harold and Maude. Harold and Kumar. “Harold the Helicopter, chop chop chop,” as in Thomas & Friends’ Railway Rhymes. Harold Platte, my great-grandpa who used to preferentially eat the moldy part of the cheese, likely owing to his being tragically misinformed about to how penicillin is made.

Even though my job had been, as David Perlmutter once wrote, “as sterile as a live-action Disney sitcom,” it was worth it just to hang out with this old dude who brought the LOLz.

The main reason Harold was so fun was that he laughed at my inappropriate jokes. I should have known at the instant of Harold’s first guffaw that I was not cut out for medical school. For starters, I could not stop myself from doodling on the face sheets, which in certain circumstances could serve as legal documents.

For another thing, identifying a poor woman who must have had hirsutism with a note of “white jacket; mustache” may have been, shall we say, a wee bit insensitive.

I now understand how terrible this was. But Harold apparently had not gotten the “empathy” memo, either! Or maybe he realized that, as a volunteer, he was unlikely to be fired.

In any case, he and I could not stop laughing.

I laughed harder with Harold than that time I’d sat with Nick Martin and Crystal MacPherson for a few days in 9th grade math. I am surprised I didn’t give myself some kind of aneurysm while trying not to LOL at their renditions of our teacher’s voice. (“Hell-ooo?”) Alas, Miss King swiftly separated us and I never got to cry-laugh again until the following week, when the “Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo” rerun came on.

My excuse for being a horrible person is this: My mother was a nurse and encouraged such things. See? It wasn’t my fault and I totally could have made a responsible medical professional. *Ahem.*

Back to why this job was the suckiest suck that ever sucked: I absolutely blew at what I was doing.

Pre-Meds are great note-takers. And I can remember-ize almost anything.

But for the life of me, I could NOT keep track of what a patient had been wearing when she’d walked through those doors. Because, while she’d been sitting down, four more people had checked in and I’d had to attend to the new patients. Meanwhile, the first patient had taken off her jacket and walked out to use the restroom.

It was also impossible to keep tabs on how many people accompanied a person to their procedure — the entourage always seemed to increase, as people would meet their loved ones at the hospital and drive separately.

I was supposed to keep track of where they all were sitting. Whether they had just told me they were going back out to the car to get something. Whether the people they’d been waiting for were out of surgery. Whether the doctor had already been out to talk with them after the procedure(s). Whether it was one of the doctors that preferred to talk with patients in the back, versus in the waiting room with the unwashed masses.

Etc., etc., etc.

I am not an idiot. It really was a hard job. And in my defense, there were hundreds of people who came through outpatient surgery each day.

“Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?” -Ben Stein as Economics Teacher, in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”

A lot of energy was spent trying to comply with privacy practices. Then, one of us at the front desk would invariably end up calling the patient’s name into the busy waiting room.

This defeated the purpose of having a registrar’s assistant in the first place.

Nowadays, there are check-in kiosks at many medical and surgical offices. My “job” has rightly been replaced by a trained monkey, I mean Mark Zuckerberg, probably.

Nobody seems to care anymore about whether last names are shouted from the waiting-room rooftops.

Ironically, I did learn practical stuff about medicine that summer.

Prosopagnosia is a real medical condition in which a person cannot recognize the faces of others — even those of family members, close friends, and partners. It’s said to be quite upsetting.¹ This is certainly NOT what ailed me that summer, as I sure as hell could have picked my boyfriend’s face out of a crowd. Wait, I think. Or who else who did I just go down on in the corner of the waiting room?

My problem? It’s hard to care about something — or someone — you don’t care about. I was suffering from a case of NGF, of Not Giving a F*ck (about human beings other than myself.)

It’s a scourge, I know.

And if my job accomplished anything at all, it was to discourage assholes like me from applying to medical school. If I’d been unwise enough to request a letter of recommendation from my manager or the charge nurse, either of them would have written the following:

To Those Who Somehow Are Considering This Person as an Applicant for Any Professional School — For what Lindy lacks in facial recognition, attention to detail, and empathy, she makes up with the inability to complete the “modest task that is [her] charge.” Please be advised that Lindy has also wantonly refused to abide by our dress code, insisting on multiple occasions that the idea of wearing pantyhose “had not occurred to [her], dude.” Unless she offers to “suck your c*ck for a thousand dollars” and generously allows Dr. Brandt to watch, I do not see any reason why a reasonable or sane person would admit her. In case you are not a golfer, I will switch from The Big Lebowski to another nineties movie for popular culture references: Everyone in your admissions department is now dumber for having considered her, and as a wise person from Billy Madison once said, “may God have mercy on [her] soul.”

Sincerely, People With Real Healthcare Jobs P.S. —Harold says to tell her she’d look more doctorly with a mustache.

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¹ NHS: Prosopagnosia (Face Blindness)

This story is dedicated to Patrick Metzger, but I can’t remember why I made a note to myself to remember to tag him. His writings somehow reminded me about having had a dumb job? Sorry, Patrick. Face blindness strikes me yet again!