Quilting Bee

Yesterday was just one of those days, work-wise . . . Sundays tend to go very good or very bad, seldom anywhere in any kind of middle ground. Yesterday ran pretty much the gamut.

Weekends in hospitals aren’t the same as Monday-through-Friday. There are generally no scheduled surgeries or admissions for anything else, plus sometimes there are moonlighting doctors covering various services, etc. A transcriptionist therefore never knows what to expect when it comes to work on weekends.

You can square or cube or otherwise factor that, um, factor when you’re working for a company serving accounts all over the country.

My current primary accounts are in/on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. My secondaries are in Ohio (I think; sometimes it’s hard to tell). Yesterday I got a smattering from Cape Cod, a handful or a bit more from Ohio, two or three reports out of Pennsylvania (an account I’d never even heard of), and, I think, one from one Albert Einstein or another.

Looking at it from the outside, you probably would wonder why that makes any difference at all in my workday--medical is medical, it’s all the same, right?

Well, yes and no.

Number one, a doctor or other dictator in Cape Cod speaks with a different accent than, say, a doctor in San Antonio or even in Minneapolis or Pittsburgh.

Number two, something as seemingly simple as place or city names can baffle you (and “hurt” your production. Get bored sometime and pull out an Atlas, or look one up online. Look at a map of Massachusetts and all the place/city names there, then do the same for, say, San Antonio, Texas or Minneapolis, MN. “Medical” doesn’t exist in a vacuum, whether it believes it does or not. “Medical” is about people, first and proverbially foremost, or anyway it ought to be, and people come from everywhere. I once had a writing teacher (believe it or not) who was positively fascinated by the impact of “place” on a person/character, how it could shape them; in near 30-year retrospect, I think she was right on at least two or three levels.

Number three . . . Well, never mind--I never was good at numbers.

Somehow I managed to quilt together a solid, and even productive 8-hour workday from all of those patches, although, frankly, it sucked. I would rather get nothing but reports from my primary accounts, my work-place “home.” Yes, I have a tendency to settle into a “comfort zone,” don’t care much for bouncing all around the landscape.

There seems to be a whole lot of “quilting” going on, these days. My grandmother and one of my favorite aunts would approve, having been competitive quilters for much of their lives--and, to paraphrase Maxine Hong Kingston, that I can see their lives branching into my own, they do offer me some ancestral help.

I have a friend (to whom I used to be married, oddly enough), who is now a stay-at-home mom of a 1-year-old, struggling desperately to find some income to add to what the father of their child brings in. She is a writer, a pretty good one, and is trying to quilt together enough income sources, however meager they might each individually be, to give her and her little family a bit of warmth, comfort and hope.

I know other people who are trying to quilt together patches consisting of multiple part-time jobs into a “total” that will sustain them, but even that is tough when none of the part-time jobs will give them anything close to a consistent schedule.

This is not a “new” situation--there’s nothing new under the sun, after all. Heck, my father part-time farmed and worked full time at construction for a while, and at John Deere for a long time, just to provide for us and, hopefully, give us a leg up on our lives.

A lot of us are scrambling now.

“Job security” is pretty much a thing of the past--or a sliver of the past.

So now we go back to quilting.