A Cold Day in May

Flipped the calendar forward to May but the weather makes it seem like we flipped it backwards to March. It was cold, cloudy and rainy. Well, cold is always relative. For May, it was cold. A day like this in January wouldn’t seem so bad. I guess it is going to be much warmer by the end of the week. Getting a little tired of bouncing between the ac and the heat so it will be nice when the cold stuff is over for a bit.

Take Saturday. It was warm enough to justify turning on the AC for a bit and then we had a storm blow through and temperatures dropped by about 10 degrees and we had to shift back to the heat. We ate dinner at a new Thai place that probably decided to leave the AC off and it was a little warmer than was comfortable. Not “middle of the summer with broken AC” hot but still a bit unpleasant. Probably would have been too cold with the AC on. You can’t win this of year.

Had to get some blood drawn today because my doctor likes to do certain tests once a year. Sometime over the last couple of years, they’ve moved away from a human checking you in. You either do it online or through a kiosk when you enter. They haven’t remodeled so you still have the front office with the slidy window but now they just have a blind drawn so you can’t see in and signs directing you to the kiosk.

The problem with doing away with humans is that not everyone is really able to handle the process. There was an older lady who came in and just stood there looking baffled until the person nearest the kiosk explained what she needed to do. I’m thinking this was probably a COVID thing and then they just decided not to go back. Not sure if it really saves anything since the people doing the blood draws now have to make copies of the IDs and take payment if needed. But what do I know.

I made an appointment but the places was packed when I got there. I had to sit right under the office TV which just played a series of announcements including one talking about the advantages of appointments. How your wait time would be minimal and how you’d be given priority over walk ins. It is probably all in your definition of “minimal” but I did only wait 15 minutes which is probably par for the course when dealing with medical things. Appointments are more like guidelines.

They hadn’t updated their messaging since it talked about how you take a seat in the waiting room “that was set up for social distancing” after checking in. Except it wasn’t set up that way anymore. Back to the sardine can with chairs right next to each other. The more you can pack in, the more people you can schedule so I’m sure they are glad to be done with the whole “social distancing” thing. And given that was mostly made up nonsense, I’m fine with it as well.

Given they aren’t socially distancing anymore, I suspect they’ll need to change that part of the message. But since this is a chain of labs, it would have to be done at the corporate offices because I’m sure the rotating staff of people drawing blood don’t care. I suppose someone who is still scared of COVID could complain but, then again, they’d have to talk to the kiosk and the kiosk doesn’t care. So they’ll probably have that message around for several more years.