It’s 6:30 pm and you’re just about to finish up evening rounds and head home for the day. However, your attending has seemed to have found his long-lost friend and is chatting it up about the recent vacation that he took. Five minutes pass, then ten. You’re standing there while the gunners grin and laugh at the lame jokes he’s telling about the small town he passed through. Wow, who gives a fuck?
So it’s now nearly 7 pm and you could’ve been home by now. Nothing pisses me off more than some asshole telling his personal stories on my time. Here’s a tip: Call your medicine buddy on the phone after we get finished with our work. Everybody’s happy and you still get to talk about your recent golf score.
What you don’t realize is that nobody really gives a fuck about your stories. We just want to get the hell out of the hospital where we’ve been for the last 14 hours. You may not have a life outside of medicine, but I do.
Unfortunately, this personal story-telling behavior is reinforced by all of the kiss-ass medical students and residents who pretend to care. They smile and nod, nod and smile. This keeps us all at the hospital as more stories are told and does nothing to get me out of there any earlier. If you simply do not offer any positive reinforcement, the attending will no longer engage in these story-telling sessions. Please, keep your nonverbal communication to yourself.
I propose we take it one step further and give the attending a swift kick in the nuts for each episode where he wastes one minute of my time. I feel that this will help to abate the personal story-telling behavior more swiftly than simply not offering positive reinforcement. Shit, I could be home by noon each day.
You are freaking hilarious! Keep fighting the establishment for us fellow disgruntled med students!
lmao…this blog is now in my “favorites”.
Were you part of a ton of different clubs in your first 2 years of school? There are some people in my class who just LOVE to create new clubs, and I’m pretty sure it’s all for attention. Or they are all just a bunch of kiss-asses. I am not in any clubs. I find that I don’t like medical students very much, and I don’t really care to socialize with them any more than I have to. I prefer to hang around musicians, English majors, and people who don’t even hold a degree.
Nope, I wasn’t in any clubs at all during my first two years of medical school. I always felt that clubs were just for jazzing up your CV. It seems that most of the students that are involved in clubs are doing it simply to boost their competiveness.
I really didn’t give a shit about volunteering my time on some Saturday afternoon anyway.
It also pisses me off because you’re “supposed” to do these things as a medical student, like volunteer. It isn’t enough that, during residency, you’ll be cheap labor and helping out the healthcare system in a BIG way for 3-5 years? Pretty altruistic right there.
If I want to volunteer, I’ll do so because I want to. Not because I’m supposed to. In fact, I probably will volunteer my time after medical school and/or residency. I think volunteer work is fantastic, just not when it’s coerced due to the profession you’re in.
Again, not restricted to the medical profession, but yeah, it would be great if you could tell your seniors to their face to fuck off and stop boring us with your annoying stories. And it would also be great if there were no nukes, no war, no hunger and no poverty.
Sheesh.