I just got home from a job interview. During the 40 minutes I sat in the waiting room waiting for someone to actually come interview me I had a chance to listen in on a fairly hilarious conversation between two women about the pros and cons of pet psychics. Yes, you read that right, BOTH women had TAKEN their animals to pet psychics; they were just in disagreement about how accurate and helpful they actually can be. One woman had been told her dog had helped invent the A-bomb in a previous life and his soul still carried a lot of guilt for it which was why he was shy and jumpy. The other woman thought that was crap BECAUSE that isn’t at all how reincarnation works. She only brings in a psychic when she really wants to get a feel for what is going on, at the animal level, in her household with all her animals. So that right there was worth the $1.50 I put in the parking meter. If I hadn’t been there for an interview I totally would have jumped in with some great fabulous lie about what MY pet psychic had said.
After one of the women and her yellow lab (not the inventor of the A-bomb) were take down the hall for acupuncture (which I didn’t get to see – but I asked and there is no special room which SO bummed me out because I so wanted there to be mood lighting and candles like my acupuncturist has) I had time to focus on the fact that there was dust, hair and FOUR HUGE LEAVES strewn across the waiting room floor. If there had been a dry mop leaning against a wall I would have used it. I actually had an inner debate about how bad it would look if I started plucking leaves off their floor. I decided to focus on the employees instead. It took me about 3 minutes to ascertain that ALL the front desk staff were sporting serious notice-them-from-across-the-room tattoos. Apparently back in college when I turned down that FREE daisy chain around my ankle because I was worried it would negatively affect my career when I was older I was just being silly. RIGHT NOW? I kind of wish I’d done it because it would have been back before everyone had them and it would look cool. Oh yeah, I was also worried if my parents ever saw it they would disown my ass and they were totally still supporting me back then. Never mind. Good call on my part after all.
ANYWAY… so yeah… there was a guy dispensing meds wearing vans with no socks who had full arm tats, a woman with yellow (not blonde, yellow) hair with black roots and like a half arm tat (is there an official term for that?) and… well, a 300 pound woman with crazy wild red hair with some sort of faded jungle cat around her wrist. Finally the woman who was supposed to interview me decided to come back to the office and she took me upstairs (stepping over PILES of animal hair... piles swear to God) where I gave good interview and made her laugh and decided not to bring up my tattoo deficiency. Let her think that maybe under my sensible smock I had a life sized monitor lizard writhing across my back. Then I got a tour where I disappointed a tech by not batting an eye that most of the insides of a cat were laying outside the actual cat. This random tech actually said, “I thought you’d freak out” to me and I just stared at her because my brain was all “I don’t think the cat is dead… no I think it is actually… yeah dead cat... is that a clump of clumping cat litter they removed? Dude that thing is like 2 inches across. FUCK maybe I should stop using that stuff” and then we walked back out. Probably permanently since they want someone to work four ten-hour-days and they wanted one of those to be Saturday. They really should have mentioned that on Craigslist:
Tattooed veterinary assistant who doesn’t mind a little dirt wanted. Must be willing to sacrifice their weekend and ideas about the importance of a sterile medical environment.
How many times does something have to happen to make a trend? Three, right? Okay then yeah, it is now officially a TREND that Veterinary offices no longer need to be clean and sterile. Maybe that’s actually true. I should do some research online. Maybe I missed some big study that showed that a little dirt and hair in the corners of the room actually helps the immune system and aids healing or something.
I had an interview that, while waiting for the head Veterinarian in an exam room, it was all I could do to keep myself from cleaning it. The room was marked “clean” but there was cat hair all over the floor. And all could think was, “if one of the doctors where I used to work came in and the exam room looked like this there would have been a discussion afterwards with whoever was supposed to have cleaned it.” Later, when the owner offered me a job I couldn't say, “I'm sorry, but the floors are dirty and I wouldn't feel comfortable bringing my own cat here” so I told her the other truth, which was that I would have to take a bus, the train, and then another bus to get from my house to their office and getting there by 7am would be exceedingly difficult.
I also have learned that you can’t really know how clean a place is until you work there. I accepted a job, without a working interview, at a place that seemed clean and nice during the basic tour of the facilities. It turns out that was because it was during a lull where there were no appointments and, this is key, only two employees were present. And it was in Southern Marin where the people tend to be less obviously tattooed. It seemed ideal. Until I started work my first day.
The main problem? THREE of the employees (including the female vet) bring their DOGS with them to work every day. Some kind of terrier, a pit bull and a pit bull/kangaroo/bat mix. And they are given total unrestricted run of the back of the hospital. The treatment areas, the kennel, the freaking SURGERY wing, the dogs are there. I knew it was NOT going to work when I looked over and saw the vet's little white dog sitting on the floor of the surgery suite WHILE she had a dog OPEN on the table. I said, "Is Katie supposed to be in there?" and Amanda said "No, is she in there again? She usually just waits at the door" and went and got her. Yeah, that's a REAL sterile environment. *Shudder* And stuff like they'd have a dog sitting on the scale and be getting vitals and one of their dogs would just wander up and sniff his butt. We NEVER let animals have contact with each other at my other job. And there were these two OLD like 20 years OLD cats in kennels next to each other (one of them was BLIND) and they put this GINORMOUS barking Dalmatian in the double kennel under it. And it barked like a fiend and I all I could think was that the blind cat probably thought it had died and gone to HELL.
But the GINORMOUS DOG (that leaked... yuck) actually kind of saved me in a way because when they screeched, "Laurel quick get Nate take him out back his butt is leaking again" at me and I had 100 pounds of dog pulling on my left arm it (not at all surprisingly) made that same part of my back hurt that hurt the first time a dog 100-pound tried to remove my arm. Not as badly as when I was actually injured but it did make it twinge.
So when the vet talked to me later in the afternoon I voiced my concerns about my back, about being able to do the work, reinjury, etc. I did not voice my OTHER concerns because there is just no NICE way to say, "your hospital is disorganized and dirty" and believe me before my back tweaked I spent about five hours trying to think of one. He was nice, told me to go home and ice it, said we could work around me having 100-pound dogs yanking on me. I wish it was a different kind of hospital.
So the next day I called and told him my back was sore, which was true and that I was sorry I wasn’t going to be able to work for him but I thought I really needed to find a front office vet receptionist job. Which was also true. I don’t actually really want to have my arm partially removed by another huge dog. So I’ve been applying for Receptionist jobs.
So now I’m kind of at a loss. My rule has always been “I would never work anywhere I wouldn’t take my own cat” and it worked up ‘til now. I’m still driving Tandy up to Marin to my old place of employment. A place, I might add, that was kept as clean as humanly possible when I worked there. If you ever had down time, you cleaned something. That was the unofficial motto: if you've finished all your other work there's always something you can clean. I can’t imagine that continuing to take my cat to my old vet all the way up in Marin if I have a job with a vet HERE would go over very well. Nothing says pride in my workplace like “I’m going to be late I have to take my CAT to the vet that isn’t YOU!”
So what do I do? Give up on the cleanliness thing? Make John sneak Tandy to the vet up in Marin? Take a job where everything else is great? Or just keep going on interviews until I find a place that meets my apparently ridiculously high standards and then jump through hoops to get them to hire me? Tell me what you think I should do and then click the link below. But make sure you swallow any liquids first or you're going to snort coffee through your nose.
- Related Link: http://www.mypetpsychic.com/
