in eff'in shunsee

boys and girls, it's time for the whinging aemii to make an appearance yet again. get ready for another rant! =)

today's word, brought to you by the letter X and the number 42, is inefficiency. een-eh-fee-shun-see.

it's a hard concept to grasp by some people, but it's antithesis seems to be a much more endangered concept due to its profound nature... efficiency is a concept so confusing that many people here don't seem to carry it in their vocabulary bag. but never mind that for the moment. after all, it appears that it doesn't really exist anyway. inefficiency is friends with many other words that you may already know, such as disorganized, incompetent, slack and slipshod.

now, it's an important concept to grasp dear boys and girls. you need to know how to recognize it so you can keep yourself and your loved ones away from it. because it's such a slippery concept amongst the natives here, i'll try to explain through examples.

we'll start out simple. take the hospital consultants who are scatterbrained and inefficient. the ones who will start seeing patients in one ward, get distracted by someone and tramp to the other end of the hospital to see that patient before returning to complete his ward round where he first was. now repeat this scene five times over an hour. as well as being extremely frustrating to the rest of his entourage, it's also making things very inefficient.

next, the registrar who calls up the consultant to inform them of every patient being admitted... immedicately after seeing each patient. one may think that isn't inefficiency at all - after all, the registrar immediately informed the consultant quicksmart. couldn't be much faster than immediate. that's the confusing part, you see.. for instead of making just one single phone call regarding all the patients at the end of the shift, the registrar has ended up making at least ten different calls - wasting both time and energy. the consultant's schedule has now been made very inefficient too, with these constant interruptions.

now to something a tad more complex. take the whole visa charade. immigration is able to look up my visa status after i've given them my passport number, name and birthdate for the fourth time. fifteen minutes later on the phone, i get taken off the frickin' broken record telling me how great it is to be an australian citizen to be told that i had been granted my bridging visa, is there anything else they could help me with. It would've taken me less than a minute to get the same information online, not to mention that i knew that a few minutes after lodging in my visa application on february 3rd. i get an email 20 days later from my case officer telling me i needed to get a medical within the next 28 days. i was only also supposed to contact him via email after working hours. wtf.

so i get my medical done on march 1st. results are supposed to take 3 days max to be sent down to sydney to be cleared and passed onto immigration. 16 days later, immigration still hasn't heard a peep from the medicos. well hmph. it's not our problem, there's nothing we can do until we hear from them immigration tells me. check in another couple of weeks if you don't hear from us. they reiterated that today. by this time, a week had already passed since i emailed my case worker regarding the application status. no reply. why isn't that surprising..

so finally. finally.. the medicos pick up the phone after agonizing minutes of annoying propaganda instead of elevator music. i tell them my name and birthdate for the ninth time. my results have just been processed yesterday and will be hand delivered to the immigration dept tomorrow, the guy tells me. twenty frickin' days later. no wonder they don't have a "we'll deliver in half an hour or it's free" policy.

first of all, why did it take 'em twenty frickin' days to process blood results? hepatitis serology can be ready in half that time. why were the results sitting here for a day when they could've been hand delivered today? why weren't the results mailed to immigration the minute they were cleared instead of wasting valuable human resources to run 'em over. repeat after me, boys and girls... eeen-ehh-feee-shun-see.

boys and girls, i'm afraid this might be a contagious state. i've been showing such tendencies lately and have become quite inefficient in covering planned topics of study myself. even the best of us will relapse into periods of inefficiency! be wary, be mindful and remember to remain efficient!

addendum, o3.24.o7 ~ so much for my results being hand-delivered to immigration. called 'em up on friday and they still don't have a clue about my medicals. dude!!