interesting karma kickback yesterday at work [View all]
The morning shift tech is usually pleasant to work with, but can be unexpectedly nasty in very passive aggressive ways. So yesterday was slow. She mentioned the ED had been steady but at least the CBCs had all been negatives, so there hadn't been any diffs (manual differentials on the CBCs).
During a coffee break, she started chatting about a book that she's reading about an ancestor of hers. Several of her family came over on the Mayflower. So I talked a little about my family history, mentioning that half my grandparents came from Greece. Which led her to say, "Well I hate to tell you this, but Greeks are lazy people" and the next thing you know, she's ranting about the financial crisis there and how that's due to Greeks being lazy.
Seriously? 
Anyway, I blew it off. After she left, an ED came in with a positive CBC. So I'm standing by the printer waiting for the report, and nothing came out. A little investigation and I discovered that during the night, somebody had accidentally switched off the printer. When I turned it back on, a positive diff on an ED printed out from 8:20 in the morning.
This was a serious, serious mistake on her part. The nature of the positive was such that it required a full diff, not just a scan, to confirm there was no instrument error. If there had been an instrument error, somebody could have been incorrectly treated or incorrectly released from the ED.
The thing is, we are supposed to check the instrument monitor, which shows POSITIVE in bright red, and we are supposed to check the results on the pc monitor, which showed 38% Monocytes, which is extremely high. Instead, she was just resulting everything without looking and depended on the printer, which only prints out positives, to flag her. Um, can you spell l.a.z.y.? 
So when we find major mistakes, we leave "love letters" for the person who effed up. Yesterday I wrote my first for a fellow tech. 
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