#214 - RD

When I first started working I had the honor of working under a verteran...#214.  She had been there many years and was the "office manager."  She scheduled appointments...sometimes, she did billing...sometimes, she answered the phone...sometimes, and she frowned...a lot.  She was a spinster, in her mid-fifties, never been married.  She was not a very attractive lady, and her lack of personality and her frown did not help her out at all.  In other words, she was mean.  I was scared of her... for about 2 days.  Then I just realized that she was mean and standoffish to cover up for the fact that she had no idea what she was doing. 

And so it started...  I probably should feel bad, because the end result was that I got her fired, but I just cannot make myself feel bad.  It started off by me asking easy questions like, "Why is this stack of checks in this folder?"  For some reason, she took offense to this.  Turns out that she did not like to deposit checks into the bank until she had posted the payment to the account and this sometimes took a few weeks.  There also was the time that she called me into her office to reprimand me for making an ink mark (really like the stroke of a pen) on the outside of a patient chart.  She told me that she was calling me into the office so that I would not get in trouble with the boss, because he would be really mad if he saw it.  Yeah right, anyone remember # 169.  Then there was the time that she told me that she thought I should stop wasting so much of "the boss's" time by asking him about patients.  She said that he would get aggravated if I did not leave him alone.  Sigh...  I think it was at this point that I decided that enough was enough and she had to go.  Soooo, I started to point out to "the boss" the things that she was doing that were not right.  This was all around the same time that computers were coming out.  I convinced "the boss" to purchase one.  Then I convinced him to put our office management system on it.  It goes without saying the neither "the boss" or #214 had any clue about the computer and basically were scared of it.  I'll never forget the time that I sat with #214 for about an hour after work to show her how to turn on and off the computer, the monitor, and the printer.  No lie.  The sad part is, she was so resistant to the new technology, that the next thing I knew, I was taking over her job duties...first payroll (she really hated the fact that I now knew how much she made - which I will tell you was way more than she deserved), then billing, then receivables etc. etc. etc.  All the while, I was trying to "train" her, but she was totally resistant to any and all changes.  She wanted to keep "backing up" everything that I put on the computer, on index cards and keep them in a magic box that she kept locked in the safe. 
Double sigh!

Long story long...eventually enough was enough, and she had to go.  I really had nothing against her personally, but her refusal to bend and learn, led to her getting canned...by "the boss."

And that is the story about how I got to be in charge :)