Currently in EdnaVille in shiny things

It’s… it’s.... two entries in a hair less than three weeks!!!! Shocker!!!

And of course I want to write but have nothing specific to say, so Currents it is. I’m back to having a slow spell at work and I want to do something slightly productive.

Current State of the Microcosm: It’s quiet, and has been a little odd, what with two new bosses in six or eight months. One replacing our dean, the other replacing the associate dean (number 5 in the nearly 10 years I’ve been here). Number 5 has actually JUST started, as in a few days ago, and she’s spent most of that out of town for a conference. So I’ve barely seen here. Kind of amusingly, she seems bizarrely shy and introverted. Not sure that’s a good thing for dealing with entitled students and Helicopter Parents, but she will certainly fit right in with our Office O’ Introverts.

OH, the other odd thing going on is with Aggravation Receptionist. Longtime readers will certainly remember AR, our sighing, languishing, work-avoidant, perpetually drama-ridden receptionist. I’ve worked with AR for ten (looong looong looong) years, and in all those years she has never ever NOT had some sort of health crisis going on. Hives, pneumonia, cracked ribs, bunions requiring surgery, “female issues” of every possible type, perpetual colds/sinus infections/flu.... it seriously never stops. And she never stops telling us all about every twist and turn. WELL, she has always said she’s got Chiari, which is a condition where the cerebellum is malformed and extends into the spinal area, messing up the flow of spinal fluid. Which can cause a lot of problems, like headaches and numbness in extremities and balance issues and vision problems. She told me she had this condition right after I started working here, but in recent years says her symptoms are getting worse.

The odd thing is that her symptoms don’t sound to me like any of the symptoms that are usually associated with it. Headache is the big one - she never complains of headaches. She’ll say she’s always in pain and only sleeps two hours a night… but is very vague about what exactly the pain IS. Joint and general body pain, it sounds like. BUT all this to say that she decided to have surgery for it. She found a specialist in New York and went to see him, and then had the surgery about two months ago. She’s been out of the office all that time, of course, and won’t be back until sometime in March.

I looked up the doctor who did the surgery. Because, yes, I am nosy. And I found the whole thing REALLY peculiar. She went to a specialist in Wake Forest a couple of years ago who basically told her she’s a time waster (after seeing her tests and xrays) and wouldn’t even examine her. Her long-time neurologist here in town dropped her as a patient after she made the appointment for surgery. (She said it was because she rescheduled an office appointment with them. Which seemed quite strange, as well as very weird timing.) And when looking up the specialist who did the surgery, I found he’s been sued a number of times for doing unnecessary Chiari surgeries. (From reading up on it, it sounds like most people don’t have a severe enough case to warrant brain surgery.)

SO. What the hell??!!?? I did ask her if she’d researched the surgeon and the Chiari center (they are apparently the only specialist center in the US) and she said she’d done lots of research, so I didn’t say anything else about it, of course. I hope it’s legitimate, and at least they didn’t kill her, but I’ve been convinced she’s a world class hypochondriac for so long that it’s hard to believe she’s not. But, hopefully this will take care of ALL her problems! And she’ll actually be a productive office member!

Naturally, being AR, she just emailed us all last week listing all the days she’s taking off for vacation from April till October. Which of course are all arranged around every holiday we get, hindering vacation-scheduling for the rest of us. Since she had exactly no sick time or vacation time for this three month leave, she was able to go through Human Resources and ask for donations of sick time. We all thought the rule was you could go through the shared leave system once and that was it, but after her vacation days email, we got another HR email (campus wide) requesting donated leave again. Which we all found pretty annoying since we can’t see how she’s going to have all the vacation days she requested as it is - the days she’s sucked up around each holiday!! Now she’s asking for MORE donated leave!!! We all donated to her the first time around, so I seriously doubt she got more from any of us. OH and she already wants to work from home, despite saying in her email that she was still having a lot of (unspecified) issues.

She doesn’t work when she’s HERE, for fuck sake. Seriously, my office-mate who is doing AR’s stuff while she’s gone is doing that plus all her own work and is getting it all done with ease. I don’t know if they’re letting her or not- New Dean did at least say she’s got to get cleared by her doctor before she can work from home. And I’m not saying a word about it, since if she can surf the web and text her draaama family from home and get paid for it (as she does when she’s here), then I can certainly work from home myself next time we’re snowed in, and not have to take vacation time. I can answer a few emails and say I worked eight hours!! We actually have progressed enough technologically-speaking that I can do pretty much anything I need to from home, I’ve just never done it because i have plenty of vacation built up for snow days, but I’m certainly going to do it next time we get a blizzard.

Hahaha, I have spent this entire entry of “currents” bitching and speculating about AR! I guess if that’s what it takes to make an entry, so be it.