Kate's Point of View

My cubicle at work is up against a wall that splits up my office area and the conference room next to me. The other day I came into work and within a half hour of my arrival started hearing a royal bitch out session going on next door. It was horribly awkward. The quotes were all along the lines of, “You cannot do this to me! I brought you here!” Weird, right?

So this all started around 8:30 or 9 in the morning. At 11 it was still happening. When I left for lunch it was still going on. When I returned at 1 it was still going on, only a new male voice had joined the yelling. Finally I just couldn’t take it any more.

I walked down to the Human Resources, full of purpose and indignation. The woman at the front desk was unfamiliar to me, but I pretty much unloaded on her. “I’m not sure what’s going on that room,” I said, “but you need to let them know that we can all hear. In the future people need to be aware of that out of respect for whomever is being yelled at. We all feel sorry for whoever that is.”

Before I even finished y little tirade the lady was up and off and to find someone to fix the situation. A few moments later she found me in my cube with a funny little grin on her face.

Those people we listened to and were scared of all morning? Actors auditioning for an HR training video.

I live in a medical world. I work at a medical center, I do freelance work for two different medical companies, I have several physicians who attend to my own medical needs and I have friends who have elected to become doctors.

It’s been those friends who have set the standards for what I think of doctors. I remember being a year or two out of college at my friend Mike’s house and another friend, Jason (one of the many to come in and out of my life) was talking about his medical school interviews. He had been doing various internships (in morgues) and exploring summer work abroad to learn a little about alternative medicine. The thing that killed me about Jason, and ultimately ended up killing our friendship a few years later, was how he turned into a complete egomaniac as soon as he started talking about being a doctor. I called him out on it, because what else are friends for, and he told me he needed to be a egomaniac. He said, and I am paraphrasing here because it was too long ago for me to remember his exact words, “I need to be egotistical. As a doctor I will be having control over people lives – whether they live or die. You can’t take on that kind of responsibility without having ego. How else could you keep convincing yourself you could do the job?”

For a while I accepted that. For like 2 seconds.

I respect my doctors the same way I respect my mechanic, the woman who rings me up at the grocery, the man who drives my shuttle bus at work. I respect anyone who does their job and does it well. I don’t think anyone is better than me and I don’t respect anyone more than I respect myself. No one deserves that.

So, as a personal rule, I call doctors by their first names. It’s the absolute quickest way to deal with them as an equal. On occasion I run into a doctor, as I did just the other day, who played the prick card and makes me feel small. I haven’t gotten to a place where I never am reduced to feeling itty bitty, but I am working on it.

Tonight I am meeting a doctor for the first time, not for work but for my own medical needs, and we’ll see how it goes.

Her name is Elizabeth.

I am not a mature individual. I keep getting assigned topics at work where I have to edit web content on … questionable subject matter. By questionable, I mean topics ranging from anal issues and sphincters to vaginal lubrication and what can and cannot go into your vagina. Two words I would prefer to never say at work include SPHINCTER and VAGINA.

The one good thing I can say about working on the GYNACOLOGICAL content versus the COLORECTAL content is that this time there are no pictures, which is a good thing because when I read the line “Spread the lips of the vagina (labia) apart before applying” I shuddered at the possible illustrations…