Why hospitals are like airlines

After a recent experience waiting for my mother to have surgery at a hospital, I offer the following comparisons with air travel:

Wait times:

• Hospitals make you come in advance of your scheduled surgery time and make you wait in uncomfortable chairs for hours.
• Airlines make you come in advance of your scheduled flight time and make you wait in uncomfortable chairs for hours.

Preparing:

• Hospitals make you put on skimpy gowns that expose your nether regions to cold drafts and everyone's sight.
• Airport security checks make you feel like your nether regions have been exposed.

Delays:

• Surgery is always delayed and takes longer than scheduled.
• Airline flights are frequently delayed and take longer than scheduled too.

Food:

• Hospital food is mass prepared in a cafeteria miles away, put on trays where they try to keep it hot before it is served to you, at a time when you probably don't want to eat.
• Same with airline food (who wants to eat a full meal at 11PM?)

Now if I could only get Aeroplan miles at the hospital......

Mother Nature is bigger than all of us

Most of Ontario, Southern Quebec and the Maritimes experienced Mother Nature at her worst as a major snow storm blew through Sunday and Monday.

Ottawa got 34 cm of snow on Sunday which was the most snow on record for a day in December since 1938 (the year they started keeping weather records in Ottawa).

The only thing to do was to stay inside on Sunday and stay off the roads as they were too dangerous, covered with snow and slippery, with periods of low visibility from heavy and drifting snow.

Most Ottawa neighbourhoods look like they are in the middle of February and not just the middle of December, with snow banks ranging from 4 to 8 feet high. It took me over an hour using a snow blower to clear my driveway and the snowbank left by the snow plow Monday morning.

A day like Sunday makes you realize how inconsequential mankind is. We can't master or overcome weather. All we can do is take shelter where we are, hoping for it to pass.

A male purple finch took refuge from the storm under some branches from the Christmas tree that I had left on the front steps. Unfortunately, he was smothered by the weight of the snow that blew onto the steps and covered the branches. I found him this morning as I was shovelling the steps, a bundle of bright, red feathers, perfectly preserved.

Woes for Ottawa taxpayers

Ottawa Mayor Larry O'Brien commented last week that “It’s been a shitty week” after being charged by police with attempting to bribe and influence peddling. However, he did decide to stay in office pending the outcome of the charges in court.

Ottawa city council also tabled a 4.9% tax increase for next year's budget.

It would be safe to say that it was a pretty shitty week for Ottawa taxpayers too!

It's not snow deep!

This very fuzzy black squirrel has been visiting our bird feeder to eat the seeds the sparrows throw out. Today's wicked snow storm meant she had to dig deep to find them. All we could see was a hole and the squirrel's head popping out every once in a while to look around.

Miss Organization

My wife reorganized the home office recently.

She purchased two new file cabinets at Staples with plans to replace an old lateral file cabinet we bought many years ago. She figured that all the stuff in the laterals would fit in the two new cabinets. On seeing them, I said there was no way that the contents of the lateral would fit into the new, smaller ones.

Well. After pulling everything off all the shelves and cabinets and incorporating the two new file drawers…THERE WAS STILL A BIG PILE OF STUFF ON THE FLOOR!

Our home office is obviously misorganized.

Word Imposters

One of my biggest pet peeves is people who think they can use Microsoft Word and come up with the most creative formatting you can imagine to do things that Word already has features for or to mask that they don't actually know how to use Word.

I call them imposters, because they are just pretending to be experienced Word users.

Recently, I was reading a document formatted as a report with headers and paragraphs. As my cursor hovered over the paragraph section, I saw a table box! Just one cell, carefully inserted to indent like a paragraph. I think there is a feature for paragraph formatting in Word.

Another formatting favorite - using spaces for tabs!

How about forms? I love those! Try entering text in one of the text fields and watch everything wrap around because there are FIFTY spaces inserted there.

The worst thing is when you try to reformat these wonderful documents.

I once was collaborating on a document created by a Word Imposter and after input from several other contributors, the formatting was so badly corrupted that I ended up copying the text, all 20 some pages, and pasting them as UNFORMATTED text to a new document. I even tried sending the document to the software support desk and they couldn't fix it. I finally had to spend several hours reformatting the entire thing.

In frustration I said to my manager that the document was a piece of crap. Boy did I ever catch it! He thought I was referring to the document contents.