Baseball fans are beginning to get impatient now that the lockout is reaching well into its second week. As far as anyone can tell, everyone seems to have gone home for the holidays, and they have no intent on getting this lockout resolved before the new year. It would be nice if teams could resume practice at the training facilities and if big-name trades could resume. It’s already hard enough to deal with no games being played, but now there isn’t even much conversation about prospects or the future of the next season. Everyone is focused on the lockout despite nothing happening.

Perhaps this will not be a permanent thing, but as for right now, it is the best thing I can do for myself. I am unhappy at my position with ISH, and I do not think that things will get better. In July they implemented a new call system for our clinic, and it has been sub-par, at best. Our clinic is a shining spot in the community because we offer small-town, genuine care. Our patients used to be able to get in contact with us directly, and now they must talk to at least two other people before they land on a line with someone they are familiar with. Our patients hate it, and they tell us often that they are unhappy with the changes.

Yesterday we had a meeting with some of the bigwigs and it was kind of sad to see the women around me act the way they did. Rather than stand up for the patients, they agreed with Kim that they would just need to “get used to it” because this was a time of growing pains. Maybe the patients shouldn’t have to get used to it. Maybe this clinic should stay small and stop acting like its a big medical plaza inside a booming metropolis. We are in the middle of nowhere, Iowa, and the people here don’t want to have to talk to a call center.

The girls who run the call center take no accountability for the things that go wrong, and when we explain how something needs to be different, they usually ignore what we say. I said very little in the meeting yesterday because I knew that it would fall on deaf ears. What I did bring up was swatted away and seen as something that had already been addressed.

Perhaps I am not with the right company and there is somewhere better out there. I do not plan on moving away, so my options are limited. Right now I would rather just change industries and attempt to wade back into healthcare at a different time.

Even though my neck of the woods just received almost four inches of snow, the meteorologists in the area are still trying to sell us on the idea that December 15th will be nearly seventy degrees. Yes, I am a major downer, but it isn’t out of spite. I try to remain a realist, and anyone from the Midwest knows that if you have this much snow on the ground, you will not see southern temperatures. The fact that rain is supposedly coming with this system makes me cringe. I can already see mountains of ice being dumped on the already snow-covered roads.

I love warm weather. If I could move somewhere warm and dry, I would do it in a heartbeat. My home is here in the midwest, and so these periodic promises of warm weather only drive the knife a little deeper once winter proves all the intelligent people wrong.

When I’m wrong, I’ll be the first to admit that I am wrong. So please, let me eat my words here in just a couple of days.

I know that I have been silent for the majority of the year, but 2021 has been nothing but a whirlwind for me. I am once again considering a new career path, and the decision has been weighing heavily on my mind.

One day I intend on having this little corner of the internet up and running. I can only guess when that day will come.