It's not all fun and (scottish) games...

"I've always been crazy, it keeps me from going insane," says Hank Williams, Jr. I don't take anything seriously. Life and death, whatever. Rule #1-don't sweat the small stuff, rule #2-it's all small stuff. My coping mechanism is to try and find the humor in things. Don't get me wrong, I have overcome the juvenile class clown attitude of a 14 year old, and am serious when it is appropriate, but will say something stupid at the (mostly) right time. It is, as they say, how I roll. But lately I am having trouble laughing somethings off. I feel that as a leader I have an obligation to stay professional, lighten the mood when appropriate, and not let little things bother me. And, trust me, there are a lot of little things. "Semper Gumby," my email says. I am new to the contractor world. There is politics and bullshit in every job. Here they are unbelievable. We are a subcontractor to Dyncorp, International. They contract to the US governmet. We are contracted to provide healthcare to their employees and other subcontractors. We kick ass doing that. We are asked to do a lot. We are promised equipment and space, tents, buildings, etc. that doesn't materialize. We adapt and overcome. Move forward, that's our attitude. We are doing physical exams starting at 0500. We are supposed to have a tent to do them in. Nope. So we are doing them before sickcall. They want us to do 20 a day. Right now we are doing 5. That's all we can handle. We could push out 20, but it would kill us and, Dyncorp would say,"you're doing 20, you don't need extra space." We get punished for our success. I announced that we have to fail or we'll never get the stuff we need. We are constantly being praised for our achievements and how well we treat our patients, which has lead to jealousy from other departments, including the manager of our contract. It is freakin' crazy. We are constantly being secretly inspected and told to clean up our clinic. We live in the desert in a shit hole. We are surrounded by people who just throw their garbage on the ground and it blows onto our compund. People walk through our compound smoking and think that the whole base is one big ashtray. We clean up every morning, including policing the grounds and picking up every little piece of trash and cigarette butt, including used toilet paper and water bottles from the port-a-potty in front of the clinic. It is what it is. Not good enough. They wrote us up for "signage." We have asked for a painted sign instead of the sign made from tape that has gotten sandblasted by the desert winds. Did they give us one? No. Did they write us up for a shitty sign? Yes. Please. Every morning they come and empty our garbage cans for us. We generate a lot of garbage. We have asked for a dumpster but have been declined. Ok, we'll deal with it.
Someone came to clinic claiming to be an employee's boss demanding that he be seen at lunch time. The guy had a cyst on his head. Not an emergency I told the "boss." "Yes it is," says he. " No, it's not," says I. Round and around we went.  I finally asked him if he was a doctor. Of course he said no. Then he asked me to define an emergency, which I did. I finally went and got our manager. "You deal with this idiot," I said. We kept telling this idiot to come back at 1600 (4o'clock) for sick call. Karki and I went to lunch. That's how we dealt with the situation. We came back and the Bozo was back at 1400. 200 hours early. OK, I'm not good with military time)
"You're kidding me," I thought. Fine, I went and got the Doc to deal with this guy that had a cyst that we weren't going to remove.
Turns out it was a set up to get us to violate HIPPA, the federal privacy laws. Earlier his boss had come in. Twice. Not at sick call hours. He bandied the big bosses name around. Fine, we'll see you. Then he went back to HQ and claimed that we had refused to see him! Then he came back two days later and did it again. We saw him straight away but he ran back and did the same thing. You are kidding me.
The last straw was two nights ago when we caught the alleged "boss dude" taking pictures of our full garbage cans, This is the underling of the liar. They are all nuts. He jumped into a convoy of three SUV's and sped off into the night with pictures of our trash cans full of...trash. Waiting to be picked up by the trash man. This stuff has got to stop, or I'm going home.
You can't make this shit up...