What.A.Day indeed! Today (technically now yesterday) was planted by a seed on Friday afternoon, at 5:01 EST. The registrar's office of my school sent out an email notifying students that the electives available after September (that's in about three months...) would finally be available to book beginning the following Monday. How kind of them to send that out after the office closed at 5pm, for the weekend.
Fast forward to Monday. Every senior student has of course read that email, and is ready to jump the phone lines first thing that morning, including yours truly. I needed three, three, measly little electives and I would be done. I just wanted (granted only wanted, not needed) them to be in Chicago so I wouldn't have to pick up my life any sooner than necessary. One of the many reasons I moved to Chicago in the first place was to avoid doing just that. I wanted to stay in one place for monetary, personal, and stress reasons. So I start dialing. The first three times I'm told the circuits are busy. After that I perused through my emails and found a different number, and back doored my way into the holding queue. I was intercepted by student services, who suggested I leave a message, but I firmly maintained that I wanted to be in the queue. By the time my message was answered and my email request received everything would have been taken. So I waited. I waited a total of NINETY minutes, before I finally spoke with an advisor. In three minutes my schedule was set. I'll recap that for you; I waited ninety minutes to spend three doing my business. I got my last three electives, in Chicago. Woot. It looks something like this.
Early Monday morning I decided that I would be late and just accept having to rush through my notes before rounding in order to get my stuff done, so I left about an hour later than I normally do for rounds. On top of that, my partner, for the fourth day in a row, notified me mere minutes before rounding was scheduled to begin that he was unable to come. His reasons have varied by the day, and apparently it reached a head such that the medical education director called him and said unless he was in the Emergency Room he was not too sick to come in. I honestly could not care whether he showed up or not. I just did not appreciate, repeatedly, not being informed of it until it was too late for me to do anything about it, so half the patients didn't get rounded on until the physician arrived--which is bad. Usually I finish rounding forty-five minutes to an hour before the doctor arrives, and I spend that time either studying, reading the news, or gabbing with my fellow students about God-knows-what. However, I could also be using that time to see more patients.
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