The Workaday World

I'm still trying to figure out the politics of my new job, and this week got another surprising lesson, at least to me. We have lots of tedious manual processes that I've wondered why people put up with them. Now I know.

Last week, my cohort and I worked through the laborious process of closing the books for the end of the month. We started at about 4pm and finished up at 11:30pm. I was frustrated and exhausted, he was jubilant. From my point of view, the whole thing was a pain in the ass, for him it was 7 1/2 hours of overtime, even more than usual. Probably because my inexperience slowed him down.

The next day he pointed out that he usually does the process from home, where he can do other things during the long periods of computer processing, but he always books 6 or more hours of overtime.

This week, I took one of the most manual parts of the monthly process and wrote some scripts do the work. I had a chance to test them out in our development environment since it needed a month end close for some other things they were doing. I ran my scripts. Less than 10 minutes, they were done, versus a solid hour of typing away for the manual method. Not only that, I had complete logs of the process that showed there were no errors. I was jubilant, some of my colleagues were not.

I am threatening their "rice bowl". My nature is to improve things, these other guys are more into milking things. I wonder how this will play out?

My new Religion

In the news today is a pastor from Florida who has declared "Burn the Koran" day for next Saturday, which is also September 11th. That is supposed to be inflammatory towards Muslims and not in good taste PC wise. I don't think it's such a bad idea and I'll do it one better. I hereby declare "Burn Holy Books" day.

In all religions the original founder/prophet/messenger from God had his ideas taken over and warped and rewritten by the next generation or two of followers. I think they all get it wrong, their motivations have become contaminated by ego, power and wealth. To combat this problem, I think first of all we should demand that only teachings from the original prophet be allowed. And secondly we should keep the entire religious literature to one page.

For the Christians, let's keep it to the 10 commandments. For the Moslems, they have their equivalent. The Buddhists are pretty hard to pin down, let them come up with something. And same for the rest.

I realize this will put out of work thousands of scholars from so many religions but so be it. They would learn and teach a lot more useful information if they had to get a real job. Religion should be a part of life while being a member of society, not an ivory tower to escape into and hurl down pronouncements onto us poor mortals.

So gather up your books and come on down. We'll have a whole lot of fun.

Medical

Now that I've worked in the medical biz for a couple months, I know what's wrong with it and how to fix it. Well, not really but I have observed a few things. I characterized it as a business because that's the end I'm in, I know nothing about treating patients but I am learning about the business end of things.

The problem is the doctors. Not exactly just them but them and the culture that's been created around them. Anyone who's spent any time in a hospital can easily recognize the actual doctors amongst the multitudes of other workers. The doctors wear white lab coats and have stethoscopes draped over their shoulders. Why? It's not that there's that much need for a stethoscope at any moment, it's a symbol. The symbol says doctors rule. And they do, the nurses in all their flavors (and colors) right on down to the orderlies and cleaners bow down and do their bidding.

In the hospital setting maybe this makes some sense, but on the business end it's a disaster. Doctors are control freaks who think they can know everything. Hello, they don't know accounting. So the billing and insurance processing is a complete mess. It's slow, error prone, arbitrary and generally dumb. I wonder if this is a result of being created by physicians who operate in an ambiguous environment of percentages and hopes.

At our place the doctors own the processing company. And even in the office you can immediately tell who's a doctor. I swear there's one guy that always has a large envelop like for an xray tucked under his arm in case there was any doubt. Like I didn't notice your ill fitting suit and arrogance that you carry around?

Sorry for us peons but we fall into the culture so easily. Yes, Dr. so and so, and yes sir.

Time to knock the doctors down a notch and get some real management and accounting and computer people in and make it a properly run industry. But the AMA sets the codes and ensures that the docs get their (well deserved, to them) deference and we all suffer to keep this mess going. Search the internet for "medical codes" to get a taste of the problem.