my bad
The other day I made an old lady pregnant. Most embarrassing.
Anybody who types things for a living doesn’t actually type everything she types for a living. Abbreviation expanders are handy productivity boosters that transcriptionists rely on for as much as 800% improvement in efficiency (when we’re paying attention). Mine works fairly simply; I can pull up phrases by typing the first letters of the first two or three words. So in transcribing “a right PICC line is seen in place” I type: a rpli[expand] sip[expand]. Only I can also expand “single intrauterine pregnancy” with that “sip”. And I did.
After assurances that one complaint in eleven years of transcription does not land me in too much hot water, the boss gave a standard lecture about proofreading. It’s hard to explain these expander mistakes to doctors and administrators because they look so absurd. Of course I felt bad and oh-fer-dumb. Of course I’ve been proofreading more carefully this week.
But if only they knew. Some of my typing is not typing at all, but speech recognition technology saving me the effort. Then I have to make up for the hand rest by proofreading even harder. I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and Dragon mistakes are in a class by themselves. They sound like somebody working really hard to be a smartass.
Dragon persisted in rendering “basiocciput” as “baby octopus” until I taught it better. I really need that creeping into a CT scan report.
“Both lumens flushed with saline and then packed with pepper in solution.” This is perhaps worse than “I have ordered frequent irritations on the floor”–but not by much.
A right armpit replacement, a fatal hernia seen, endotracheal tubas noted in place–the radiology department of your local hospital, as interpreted by Dragon, is a strange and wonderful place.
lasagna weekend
While I finished my tax gig, T layered up a lasagna garden bed. He had a couple of helpers, as you can see. We half-filled another frame yesterday and set our new fence posts in concrete. Now we are tired.
breather
To go outside is to receive a Texas blessing.
We had rain last night. Not just rain, either, but some kind of microburst. For a few minutes, it rained as hard as I’ve ever seen here. It rained so hard you could have gone for a walk out there and died. You wouldn’t even have needed to tip your beak to the sky. Just walking around trying to breathe might have killed you–though chances are good you would have been struck by lightning before you had a chance to drown.
So the morning dawned power-washed and sparkly. Most of the wet had been sucked up by parched ground. The alarm-clock bird got busy. Mockingbirds resumed territorial dispute soon afterwards. Manic cardinals are flashing the dogs, a couple of butterflies have turned up, the hens are cackling madly, the tomato seedlings are growing. And I don’t have to do taxes today.
‘Round here, we’re happy as kings.
