Wednesday, June 22, 2011

copy machines, folders, and labels

Those three items in the title have been my life for the past 3 days.
So much for a great, exciting, and educational hospital experience.
The department I'm working in, which for now is general medicine, decided that they needed to update and reorganize all of the information sheets and booklets in the rooms. ALL OF THEM.
So my job is to make 100 copies of all of the handouts. Doesn't seem that bad right? Well, there are 42 handouts. Making 100 copies of each takes 5 minutes. 42 handouts times 5 minutes equals 3.5 hours of my life spent standing in front of that stupid copy machine.
After making all the copies, I have to start counting and separating 20 of the 100 handouts and put it in each folder - which I also made - for all the rooms in my department. 210 folders with their corresponding color and sticker labels.
It could be worse I guess. I do have help from another intern, but that doesn't make up for the fact that while everyone else gets to practice taking vitals and rooming patients, we are crammed into a little storage room covered in paper cuts and drowning in all that paper thats in the room. We need sooooo much more room for what we are doing. Its taking us like 10 times  longer to finish because we have papers piled on papers and we can't organize them into neat little piles because there is simply no room to do that. We just have to dig through all of the clutter to find that one stack of papers we need. And when we find it, we'll realize that in the process of trying to find the papers, we lost the folders that the papers need to go in. We'll have a mini mental breakdown, force a set of deep breaths to insure that we don't go crazy, remind our selves that we only have 1-8 more hours to do, and start digging.

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