you play the part of the bleeding heart with gusto. "nono! i've never seen her like that... what has she done to make you complain so?" you defend with precarious diplomacy, careful not to alienate yourself from the complainer and come across as being in cahoots with the complainee. you tread with cautious disbelief around the stories you hear, the nicknames they give the woman. you give her the benefit of the doubt... must've been a bad day. students must've been too demanding. must've been an understaffed shift they got. blahblahblah.
one day, your world comes crashing down. well not really ~ i'm being excessively melodramatic here but please indulge me =P that day was today. it all started with one set of handwritten notes made by a consultant in '04 for her exams.
one stern warning of possible disembowelment should any part of those notes fail to return to her desk after photocopying them was issued. three sets of notes safely xeroxed, the originals were returned unscathed. one set of off-the-press notes handed out, only to be returned not five seconds later because the girl already had a set. three cloned sets travel together in one stack and land on a pile of extra pamplets at the lower levels of an open cabinet. they were to stay there for the remainder of the day. i duck back to tend to my patient to emerge an hour or so later. i see the girl and the woman holding the clones in their hands, as if discussing their contents and figuring out page orders.
sounds innocuous enough, no? another hour or so passes and i'm greeted by a lull. traipsing back to the open cabinet, anticipating some free time to read the clones 'twas i. silly me. the clones weren't where i left them! i asked the girl what they did with 'em after the discussion; she asked if i had checked the table. checked. well i don't know then, you'd hafta ask the woman herself. the girl apologetically suggests.
as i was knocking off for the day, i asked the woman if she had seen the cloned notes.
oh don't worry about those, she clucked. i want you to do some homework for me and read up on normal labor and PPHs.
yah, i'll do that. after last year, definitely. i agreed. but those notes. have you not seen them anywhere? there were 3 sets of them in the stack and i have to pass one set to another student on the orders of the consultant
lightbulb flickers above the woman's head. she makes a motion to look around the room, to search for what was not to be found until she checked her bag. out she pulled, a stack of papers resembling the clones. oh you mean these?
yes.
no explanation. just a request to have a copy for herself. we sort through the mangled mess of papers no longer kept in ordered sets and come up with 2.5 sets... the girl took some, the woman said. ahhuh. she eventually ended up with her own copy of the notes, i ended up with my stack albeit half a set short. i'm still bamboozled at what had just transpired... at such a student thing to do... and as the icing on the cake, coming from her!
woman...! you have left me speechless and clotted my blood. thank you for curing my bleeding heart.
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