Now, I don’t have permission to post this, but then neither has anything been said to prohibit me from sharing it either. Ever since I accepted the invitation to go with John to the Police reunion concert in July, he’s been serenading me with a musical countdown of songs with the # of days remaining written into the lyrics, and I’ve been going to iTunes and buying each song so I can burn a CD of the countdown to our first official conventional dateThis morning’s song and some interesting highlighting of certain exerpts by John made me laugh one of the really good belly laughs… so I thought I’d share it with you before meandering on with the rest of my post. We are at day 78 in the countdown, and this song contains the # 78. But pay particular attention to the other content John has marked…. in red… LOLOLOL!
Swing Street
by Bruce Hornsby I heard you say that tonight’s the night
You say there’s a party going on
I’m in the door like an old 78 side
And I hear ‘em out hitting on a Coleman song
My friend John with a mirror and spoon
Got a belt and a mainline scene
A couple getting off in the back room
Someone’s collecting money for the friend in needSounds like a good time, a ball to me
Sounds like a place I’d like to be
Theres a little crowd you’re gonna want to meet
Oh they got a thing going on swing streetNice old man in the corner booth
Making time with Jive-time Stu
S
he makes her sting ‘neath the table blue
Says she’s an actor but she’s hooking
as a sideline tooOh sounds like a good time, a ball to me
Sounds like a place I’d like to be
Everybody rolls when it’s time to meet
Oh they got a thing going on swing street
Got a good thing going down swing streetYou say there’s nothing but bums around here
Listen to the sound of the cymbal so clear
Cutting contest on the stand
Somebody’s trying to blow you away
What makes him swing harder than you do
Oh better hit the woodshed for ninety daysOh sounds like a good time, a ball to me
Sounds like a place I’d like to be
Theres a little crowd you’re gonna want to meet
Oh they got a thing going on swing street
Got a good thing going down swing street
Got a good thing going down swing street
Got a thing going on on swing street
Got a thing going on
Got a thing going on on swing street
I’ve still got a serious case of snotty wenchitis going on today, but I must say I feel a lot better than I did yesterday, and heaps better than the weepy wenchitis I experienced this weekend. And you know, I can’t for the life of me figure out what precipitated either, though I can tell you I’ve had to deal with some snaffu’s at work that are so weird there’s nothing to do but laugh and ask ‘what the fuck was that about?’ Yesterday as I was wrapping up a huge last minute project at 6:55 PM I had the ER manager in my office helping me get it done and my phone rang. My caller ID told me the call was coming from a patient room and she saw me wring my hands through my hands. “What’s wrong?” she said laughing.
“It’s a patient. Patients’ only ever call me for one reason. I don’t wanna tackle an irate familiy issue right now, I wanna go home! I haven’t had lunch yet. Should I let it go to voice mail?”
Naturally I picked up. The ER manager doubled over laughing when I spoke to the caller with tremendous relief. “Oh hi XXXX what are you doing calling me from a patient room?” It was another Director who had a simple question for me who had ducked into an empty room on their way down the hall on their way out & expected to leave me a quick voice message while the thought occurred to them. Then they wanted to know what the heck I was still doing at work and why on earth was there a hienna in my office. We all laughed. But really it was only funny from a punch drunk POV, ya know?
New issues have come up today, one involving a software glitch that may have skewed our performance data for two entire quarters, and it’s really bugging me that I have simply been to inundated to have caught it before now. Tomorrow I have to trouble shoot it further, and if my suspicionas are confirmed, I will have to communicate it to the whole division because I doubt we’re the only facility who has been affected. Have you ever noticed on some pages in some software if you chose an item from a drop down and then scroll down using the roller on your mouse, that the choice you made in the drop down scrolls with the page & as soon as you click into the next field the scroll in the drop down stops, but now there’s a different answer there than the one you intended? Well one of our data collection programs does this, and it has such huge query fields you have to scroll down to see the next query. If you know to click any blank space outside the dropdown BEFORE you scroll the drop down may not scroll, but on some programs you can’t use the mouse to scroll at all you have to uses the side bar down arrow. This is one of those programs! So I have discovered, completely by accident that almost half (maybe more) of the numeric values entered using the drop down are higher than the real numbers intentionally entered by the abstractor. Fortunately in this case the higher number in that particular field coupled with the appropriate NO we didn’t intervene in another field makes us look bad, (you’re supposed to intervene when patients score high on risk indicator… duh… ) so no one can accuse of of fudging to look good, (who would fudge to look bad after all?) but I just spent hours working on an action plan to correct our bad performance when it wasn’t really bad. There were three other issues I just couldn’t explain either. The charts said one thing, the data said another. Why? & I couldn’t make the leap to believe that there was any deliberate number fudging going on. The soft ware has so many holes in it. If I enter all the audit questions before I enter patient demographics, none of the skip logic works, yet the correct demographics get saved. Skip logic should boot certain questions and enable others. Since demographics is the most time consuming step, of course the abstractor clicks quickly up through the quick yes no N/A queries before manually entering cumbersome stuff like times dates, record numbers. Well, even though he’s entering a brand new patient, and has selected a new file to do so, all the demographics times and dates from the previous patient autopopulate to the new file. sooo… if skip logic for someone under 50 years of age is enabled but this new patient is over 50, all the over 50 queries are blanked out. If your prior patient was admitted, but this patient was discharged you’re asked how long it took from arrival to final disposition (& assumes this was the ER admission holding time)… even after you enter the real birthday and the actual discharge disposition for this patient, none of the skip logic that should have disabled or enabled certain queries works once a single query has been populated before the demographics have been corrected.
Now I ask you? Why would any programer allow old data from totally different cases pre-populate & drive selections for new cases unless corrected first, expecially when there is a less than 0.01% chance the next case entry will be for the same patient? Why wouldn’t demographically dependant skip logic not automatically enable as soon as the correct demographics was replaced even if data was entered into an unecessary field? and why wouldn’t missing data warnings be enabled if the correct demographics enable previously skipped fields before letting the abstractor file?
Why does this bug me? Because, hard working busy people develop intellegent strategies to make their work flow efficient. If they aren’t even warned about which strategies may produce error, they are set up. Anytime you require a triple check to assure accuracy and it’s not possible to have a second person complete the verification you guarantee errors, because you know what -intelligent, hard working, busy people will read the same mistake as correct all three times. They’re busy, they KNOW they did it right the first time their original thought process is still there alive and vivid in their minds….
So, tomorrow’s gonna be another fun day. Never in my wildest dreams when I went to nursing school did I ever dream that I was going to have to troubleshoot software glitches that call into question data integrity. Of course I never thought I’d be writing and spearheading implementation of action plans to improve performance for whole departments and the facility I worked for either.
It’s all good. Wanna know why?
1. Because mostly it’s never boring and often it’s fun, but
2. Because when it becomes overwhelming and stressful, makes me bitchy, snotty or full of self doubt. the best cure is a sound spanking, and ya’ll know I’m gonna get some of those relatively soon.
So? How was your day/week/month?
I thought about yesterday and all its hedonistic pleasures capped off by a long phone call I’d enjoyed with John. I thought about the future, and got into the now. The air became like silk on my nude flesh. The sheets, cooled by the slightly moist breezes gave my limbs new places to cool each time I shifted. I snoozed some more, eventually waking fully when the thunder became more regular and insistent, which was a little more than an hour and full dawn later. My dream had been very sensual. I had the female equivalent of a wet dream. A little manual reinforcement renewed and prolonged what the dream began. Cold now, I got up and pulled the balcony doors almost closed the cuddled under covers after putting the coffee maker on.The storm ended up being one puffed up by the sea breeze and the periodic low pressure set up by convection off the warm surf, not something produced by major clashes in air masses that make severe weather. While there was a kick up in the breeze, lots of lightning and thunder, it mostly puffed up right over the island and stayed there. In fact there were still occasional rumbles and drizzle going on when I packed up to get to an obligation around noon. Within 10 miles of home the sun was out, and the ground bone dry. The sea breeze storm, even though it lasted hours, affected a small 30 mile circle of the world. I’m sure others popped up further inland later today, but not here.
