Ho-ly cow!

Yesterday started out well enough.  We were working away in medical records when Ms. Horton's phone rang.  It was the hospital administrator, requesting her presence in his office.  We looked at each other and raised our eyebrows, because being summoned to his office is akin to being called to the principal's office in school, and I KNEW Ms. Horton hadn't done anything to be raked over the coals for.  And as far as we knew, there was no active investigation going on.

The last time I was called to The Office, there was an investigation in progress.  My boss and the social worker had gotten into a verbal tiff, and I was a witness.  Frankly, I thought it was childish and could have been settled in an adult manner, but noooo, even after a solution was proposed, they kept at it.  The end result was, the social worker, who has a reputation for writing people up, did just that to my boss.  This is the same woman who was responsible for Jim being escorted to and out the front gate.  We haven't seen him since. 

Well, Ms. Horton was gone for a long time.  I was wracking my brain for reasons why she was being questioned, and the only one I could come up with was that, a week ago, the social worker brought us a dozen authorizations for release of information at one time.  She needed them in two days. Laura from Raleigh, the boss of all DOC social workers, was not happy with her particular employee, and apologized, but there was still a question of how we were going to accomplish the task.

That wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have a stack of those from the outside to work on in addition to our regular tasks, but as it was, Ms. Horton and I were the only two people working, since our boss was out sick.  We dropped everything we were doing and worked exclusively on the releases for two days.

In  a while after Ms. Horton was called on the carpet, my phone rang.  It was the hospital administrator, requesting my presence in his office.  "I'll be right there!" I told him.  My insides were jello.  What on earth was going on?  I passed Ms. Horton in the hall and said - Roberta? Should I be afraid??  She looked at me, shook her head and said, Happy Wednesday, Ms. Broadaway!

Well, the social worker had done it again.  After Ms. Horton and I had completed her requests a day before time and she had thanked us profusely.  After she had come into our office for what appeared to be a pleasant visit.  Our boss had held her tongue, did not utter a harsh word, refrained from going ballistic over yet another dozen late requests for DDS information.  The social worker wrote my boss up again - saying she had pointed at her, made hand gestures and said - I'm going to kill you.

It never happened.  It simply did NOT happen.

Later, as we were all sitting in medical records in a state of shock and disbelief, Laura from Raleigh, the boss of all social workers in the DOC system came in, told the boss - Your two were valiant last week, and I think they got screwed without getting kissed.  A little balm, I suppose that was, to spread over the sting.

We were done for the day, though.  We went through the motions, and at 3:00, we went for lunch at Golden Corral and did not return to the confines of razor wire and rabid social workers.

I guess you meet people like that everywhere, but I swear, it's ridiculous.