every once in a while, i find that i've left a draft out in the open on this site, accidently clicked "publish" and not "save", so that months later, i'll come back and be mortified that my readers have been privy to my half-thoughts. shame on them. it's like watching someone with their skirt tucked into their panty hose for the length of a subway ride and not saying anything.
i won't comment on my various states of mind at those moments when all buttons - "publish", "save", "preview" and "close" - are all the exact same, and i mean all, but that reminds me of a time i worked for a spell at a hospital in the summers between semesters while at school...
i was supposed to be scheduling appointments and checking ill-folk in to the prime care clinic, but really i was usually just juggling my time between being bored to EXTREME, sick-stomach inducing agony OR stalking handsome young residents and learning their schedules so as to conveniently run into them on their lunch in the hospital caf, but that's obviously another story
anyhow, on one particularly slow day, i typed a poem out to some of the girls who worked with me. i remember mentioning fat - fat on my own body and certain, specific others; i made fun of jerk-ass patients and waxed more than poetic on the physical attributes of some of the doctors and turned less than Shakespearian sonnetarian on some of the nurses...i remember sending that email to "all" and by all i meant the "all" on the list of recipients i had typed in, but as i sat there with the orange cursor on the small black screen blinking back at me for a very long time (it was the late 90's - no ipad in sight) before the home screen reappeared, i should have known something was up.
after sending the email on that fateful day, i went down to aforementioned caf to see if i could ever-so serendipitously run into a certain young Doctor Tellman, when instead, i ran into a girl i kinda knew from xray at the pudding bar, who, when she saw me, simply said, "I GOT YOUR EMAIL"
mortified, i ran back to my desk, trying my best to remain calm throughout the rest of the morning's duties pull this chart, cancel that appointment, when, lo, the clinic administrator called me to her office. to make a REALLY long and terribly bed-wetting story short, it turned out that by "all", everyone in the hospital's five county network had received my ode to cellulose that afternoon. everyone, including the board of trustees, the hot docs in ER, the president, probably even the fucking candy stripers.
the clinic admin was really a terrifying woman with short brown hair who took her job super seriously and she made it clear that she could fire me but wouldn't and sent me off telling me never to touch the computer again.
sometimes when i feel i've really messed up on something, i remember the feeling i had back then on that day when my blood ran cold and i figure, well, at least i'm not emailing everyone in five counties, AND i have a Brita. that's a lot more than i can say for, i dunno, say, 884 million other fellow citizens around the globe. imagine that.
i won't comment on my various states of mind at those moments when all buttons - "publish", "save", "preview" and "close" - are all the exact same, and i mean all, but that reminds me of a time i worked for a spell at a hospital in the summers between semesters while at school...
i was supposed to be scheduling appointments and checking ill-folk in to the prime care clinic, but really i was usually just juggling my time between being bored to EXTREME, sick-stomach inducing agony OR stalking handsome young residents and learning their schedules so as to conveniently run into them on their lunch in the hospital caf, but that's obviously another story
anyhow, on one particularly slow day, i typed a poem out to some of the girls who worked with me. i remember mentioning fat - fat on my own body and certain, specific others; i made fun of jerk-ass patients and waxed more than poetic on the physical attributes of some of the doctors and turned less than Shakespearian sonnetarian on some of the nurses...i remember sending that email to "all" and by all i meant the "all" on the list of recipients i had typed in, but as i sat there with the orange cursor on the small black screen blinking back at me for a very long time (it was the late 90's - no ipad in sight) before the home screen reappeared, i should have known something was up.
after sending the email on that fateful day, i went down to aforementioned caf to see if i could ever-so serendipitously run into a certain young Doctor Tellman, when instead, i ran into a girl i kinda knew from xray at the pudding bar, who, when she saw me, simply said, "I GOT YOUR EMAIL"
mortified, i ran back to my desk, trying my best to remain calm throughout the rest of the morning's duties pull this chart, cancel that appointment, when, lo, the clinic administrator called me to her office. to make a REALLY long and terribly bed-wetting story short, it turned out that by "all", everyone in the hospital's five county network had received my ode to cellulose that afternoon. everyone, including the board of trustees, the hot docs in ER, the president, probably even the fucking candy stripers.
the clinic admin was really a terrifying woman with short brown hair who took her job super seriously and she made it clear that she could fire me but wouldn't and sent me off telling me never to touch the computer again.
sometimes when i feel i've really messed up on something, i remember the feeling i had back then on that day when my blood ran cold and i figure, well, at least i'm not emailing everyone in five counties, AND i have a Brita. that's a lot more than i can say for, i dunno, say, 884 million other fellow citizens around the globe. imagine that.
