My wife called me at about 3:45pm. She was just headed to swim after her physical. The call was in regards to the physical. More specifically, the call was in regards to the absolute disrespect with which she was treated by the physician, and the resident trailing behind her.
She was faced with what neared contempt, and an absolute disregard for my wife's assertions that, at 33 years old, she has, in fact, had physical examinations in the past, and yes she's had that checked, and yes she's had that bloodwork done, and no, that is not the medication she takes.
There is a sense that after ten minutes of conversation & borderline-inappropriate touching (&, no shit, 50 minutes of waiting in the exam room) that the Dr. has a better sense of the workings of your body, your medical history, and your body of knowledge itself, which you could never hope to maintain, so quit squirming, god damn it.
Whether it ever came up that my wife is a PhD research BioChemist, I do not know.
~abrupt segue~
At about 12:15 tonight, after talking my wife down from her rage at the treatment she recieved from the Dr., I headed over to Kinkos. I've been needing to cut some large sheets of paper down to size, to continue working on the new graphic novel. I thought it also prudent to run off copies of recent work, for my records, while I was there.
I was struck, like rude lightning, by a perverse revelation within minutes after entering the Kinkos. I was stricken with the gross realization that the employees at Kinkos behave toward their customers in almost precisely the way my wife described her Dr.
Arrogant, rude, inattentive, dismissive of any questions you may have, and unconcerned with the notion that an informed populace is a populace far less full of irritating questions about tremendously obvious things. I mean, shit, I know it should be obvious to me how the Kinkos business card pricing system works, and what their process is, regardless of the fact that I have no ready access to the information. I don't mean to bother the employees of said establishment with such trivialities...
My point is this: If such a clear line can be drawn between the attitudes of an MD & a copy-jock, people whose standing in society could hardly be more diametrically non-analagous, then we have a larger problem. A problem of ego & hubris in 21st Century America, so terrifically magnified as to have created a systemic failure. We have become so isolated within a cognitive mechanism of amplified self-importance that a smile is a waste of energy, and the hand which feeds us is nuisance.
We've all started wearing arm-bands. We're each a mob of one.
Cut the shit.
