Milkbones

Anyone who knows the real me knows I have a special Fondness for animals and dogs in particular. I am delighted to report that my dream of owning a little house dog has become a reality. Her name is Lady Cleo, and she is the same little dog for whom I had “dogsat” several months ago. Things didn’t work out for her former owner, and I have become the lucky new owner. She is a long-haired Chihuahua aka a “teacup” Chihuahua. She stands roughly nine inches high and is roughly twelve inches long. She is only five months old, but I don’t expect her to get much larger.

The Deal is that Sharon will help pay for her supplies and upkeep if she doesn’t have to clean up any dog poo. Sharon, by nature, is not nearly as fond of little animals as I am, but fortunately for me, Cleo was so sweet when we had taken care of her before, that Sharon didn’t put up much of a fight at all when Cleo became available.

Cleo spends her days under my bed while I am at work and at school. Sharon stops in after her classes to take her out to do her duty. At the suggestion of a coworker, I had started out by leaving her in a playpen all day. After several days of that, I graduated her to staying in my bedroom, and I am happy to report that in the month since we’ve had her, she has had only one unfortunate mishap. She doesn’t know yet how to tell me when she needs to go, so I still have to play the part of the Great Predictor.

We were closed today at work in observance of New Year’s Day. I welcomed the opportunity to go to work for once when there would be no disturbances or interruptions. And because no one else would be there, I declared today a “mother-daughter” day and took Cleo with me. We had a jolly time too just enjoying each other’s company.

Now many days prior to today, when I had taken our deposit to the bank, I had noticed a big box of milkbones for dogs sitting there at the window. And I always thought that that to give all the little doggies a milkbone was such a lovely idea. I well remember the days of going through the drive-through with mom and getting either a balloon or a sucker. In fact, we would drape ourselves over the seat and make a point of smiling at the teller in order to make sure we were Noticed.

So as it happened, the last thing on the agenda for today was to take the deposit to the bank. And on the way there, I happened to remember that Box of Milkbones. And I felt the old, familiar anticipation of getting a treat at the bank window begin to creep into my very bones.

I strategically chose my lane. Even though I suspected “the tube lane” to be faster, I went to the one closest to the window because I feared little Cleo was too little to be seen at a distance. And sure enough. I had picked the Slow Lane. It was so slow, in fact, that I think at least two other cars went through the tube lane before it was finally my turn to advance in “the drawer lane.”

Oh, but I played it cool alright. I made it a point of not “begging” (just like Mom had told us long ago) by acting totally oblivious to the Box of Milkbones sitting there at the window. I nonchalantly gazed at the traffic going by on the street while the teller did her thing. Will she? Will she not? Will she? This was my dog’s first visit to the bank. Surely she would be kind to such a cute little doggie. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her finish up, and sure enough, I heard the small “thunk” of what must be a milkbone. But I kept up the game. “Thank you,” I told her in my usual manner before I could even see into the drawer and began making the motions of gathering up my receipt before I went on my way. What is this?? OH. A milkbone for my doggie?! “Why, thank you!” I said again to the teller, smiling broadly. We had been noticed. The treat was ours!

As soon as we were on the road again, I gave the bone to Cleo; oddly enough, she wanted to do nothing more with it than try to push it off my lap onto the floor. She doesn’t know about things like treats at the bank. It appears we still have a lot of training left to do.

A Satisfying End

It is now the end of finals week, and the relief that washes over my very soul is nothing unlike the Balm of Gilead. Although I only had two exams I had to take this week, they took every ounce of my energy to prepare for. Both were cumulative, and those always take an extra measure of studying mercies.

Accounting
My Accounting final was on Tuesday evening. I spent about fourteen hours studying for it. My first strategy was to begin with Chapter 1 and read the book through–all thirteen chapters. But it quickly became obvious I was getting nowhere with that method of madness. So I compiled all my notes from prior tests and concentrated on those, as well as just skimming through chapters. I attended two review sessions held by other Accounting instructors, and while they were helpful to the extent that an hour can be helpful, they also revealed how much I didn’t know, how much I’d forgotten, and how much I needed to learn yet before the final.

I studied all afternoon on Sunday, all evening on Monday, and then Tuesday morning, I went to work, but didn’t clock in. Instead, I studied for about two hours–then I clocked in, did what I had to do, then left about 12:30 and headed for the library for the final cram session. When I arrived at the parking lot, I turned my engine off and I heard this burbling noise coming from the radiator. I popped the hood and saw that my reservoir was completely dry. This was not really the Ideal Time for car troubles. So I called Martin, and he advised me to drive it to an auto parts store and put some anti-freeze in. I decided to wait to do anything till after the exam.

My little friend Jill happened to arrive at the library just ahead of me, so we studied together. The problem with studying together is that you get so distracted with Issues of Life. Jill told me that she had broken up with her boyfriend at some point within the last week, so I did quite a bit of my own brand of counseling. I had been telling her all semester she needs to dump this guy–he had all the classic warning signs of being a real dweeb. I heaped all manner of Wise Advice onto her shoulders and told her exactly what he would do to try to get her back (I’ve seen it all before with the girls at work); she needs to expect it, and that will hopefully give her the strength she needs to resist going back to him. I sure hope she doesn’t take him back. She deserves so much better. She said she felt much better about it after we talked, but I’m just afraid when I–the guard dog–am not around, he’ll be back.

Other than that, we studied for about four hours solid before the test began at 5:30 p.m. We were joined later by another classmate who happened along and saw us studying. So just talking about the different areas we were having troubles in helped a lot.

Oh that test was bad, alright. Instead of being a practical, hands-on type of thing, it was all multiple choice. And although multiple choice doesn’t sound like it, those tests can be pretty bad. You have to have a lot of theory in your head, and often, a lucky guess doesn’t work.

Jill offered to take me to the auto parts store after the exam, so I took her up on it. She’s got one of those little cars that is teeny, tiny, with no back seat. Cute, but very impractical. It made me feel like a lummox trying to fold up into it. We got the anti-freeze and put it into the reservoir by the aid of a little penlight. I must remember to keep a better flashlight in my car!

I was thoroughly exhausted by the time I arrived home. I should’ve immediately begun studying for the next final, but I was just simply too tired.

Economics
Studying for Economics in Professor B’s class is exceptionally difficult simply because he is so unpredictable in what he puts on the test. He pulls his questions from some type of a test bank, so the language that the test is in is often foreign to that of what we’d heard in class. Added to that is having the options “All of the above” and “None of the above” to pick from. I hate that!

Professor B gives five tests total with no opportunities for extra credit; you can miss a total of fifteen for all five tests and still have an A. So figuring out how many I could miss on the final was critical in trying to prepare for it. That meant that I had to know my grade for Test 4, which we took last week. If we wanted those tests back to look at what we had missed, we had to call him and make arrangements to meet with him. With all my Accounting stress, I hadn’t had a chance to make arrangements until Thursday, the day before the final.

I had actually tried to stop in to see the test last Friday when I picked up my English paper, but he was not in. So I ended up just calling him for the grade, and he told me I had missed three. I was very uncomfortable with not knowing which three, so yesterday, I thought I’d try to actually go over there and look at Test 4 to make sure the same thing doesn’t surface on the final. He was in a meeting all day, so by the time he called me back and said I could come, it was already about 3 p.m. He was about ready to head out, but he said he’d stay there until I came. So that put a little pressure on me, for sure. “You didn’t miss very many,” he said. “You said I missed three,” I said. “I know. I said you didn’t miss very many,” he repeated. Not sure what that meant, but I still wanted to see the thing.

My journey across town was doomed from the very beginning. I hit every single traffic light red. I thought that since this was finals week, and therefore, fewer students on campus at any given time of day, there would surely be parking available at the top of the hill even though you have to pay 25 cents for the privilege. I was, in fact, counting on it. This parking is much closer and would cut down on the time. Not so. Not a single parking space was available, so I had to backtrack back down to the Chestnut lot. I was very anxious by this time, because the twenty minutes I had told him it would take me was long gone. I began a brisk march and took the shortest route available. Well, it had rained that morning, and so the ground along the usual path was very soft and downright muddy! I neither had the time to change my route nor the inclination, so into the mud I went and subsequently emerged with much regret. My shoes looked really bad. Trying to hurry while rubbing the mud off in the grass at the same time didn’t exactly work well either. Once I had crossed the road, walked across the faculty parking lot, around the library, through the Fine Arts Center, and across the bridge to Grise, I was a little grouchy.

Professor B was standing in the hall talking to another professor across the hall. “Well, where have you been?” He called out. I just shook my head and said, “You don’t even want to go there.” I hunkered down to study the offensive test. It turned out I had only missed two, instead of three; I could see the error I had made in the first one, but the second one was just as confusing when I left as it was when I got there even though he tried to explain it to me. Some things are better left untouched. “If I’ve missed seven questions to date,” I said, “that means that I can miss eight on the exam tomorrow, right?” Professor B didn’t think I should think of it that way, but how can I help it? I must have a little Source of Comfort to take with me to class.

Professor B has made comments all semester about how he thinks I’m “good at this stuff.” I beg to differ. I think economics is one of the hardest subjects I have come across to date, although it didn’t keep me from studying just that much more. “Shall I just use your test as the key tomorrow?” he asked good-naturedly, as I handed Test 4 back over. “Be my guest,” I said, laughing, “although I’m afraid it would disadvantage the other students.”

So this morning, we gathered together at 8:00 to take the final exam. It wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been, but I guarantee you if I hadn’t been so nit-picky about it, I would not have done well at all. It was hard, as usual, but at least I was familiar with all the topics that were presented and tried to reason them out. But poor Erica, who left at the same time I did, said she didn’t even recognize some of the questions as topics we had covered this semester. Ouch. Either she didn’t study like she should have or she had taken poor notes–neither one conducive to passing the exam.

I don’t know how I did specifically on this exam, but I did get an A for the class, which is the most important thing. I figure I’ll give Professor B a five-week break before I show up and ask for my grade.

My Accounting professor reports that I got “more than a solid A” in the class. I had gotten 147 out of 150 on the final, and because of doing all my homework and doing it right, I had exceeded the 500 points possible for the whole class.

I got a 100 out of 100 on my final English paper. The class average on the paper was a 68.9, so ouch again. I’m not sure what happened with the rest of them. We had a good professor, but I guess writing just isn’t everybody’s thing. My average for the class overall was a 97.

So all things considered, I shall declare this a satisfying end to a difficult semester.

The Deposition

Dr. G had to go through with a deposition this evening on a Phen-fen patient he had treated several years ago. I have fretted and fumed over this deposition for weeks now. It has literally been a nightmare; I see the word ‘attorney,’ and the hair on the back of my neck stands on end–that’s how bad it is.

Hot-shot Attorney from Washington, D.C., legal representative for the pharmaceutical company, called several weeks ago and scheduled the deposition for this afternoon, December 8. The law requires them to notify the other side of the deposition to allow them to also be present. Well, our experience in the past with attorneys has been that if you don’t get your fee up front, you may as well kiss it good-bye. So Kris consults other physicians’ offices as to what the going rate is for a deposition, and as we are not too keen on doing it in the first place, we decide to go on the high side and charge $1000 up front. A paper is drafted notifying the firm of the fee and the terms by which it shall be collected. It is faxed to the attorney. Well, Gopher Boy for the D.C. attorney calls and tells me that the fee is too much <pregnant pause>.

“That’s fine,” I said. “So you’d like to cancel?” (Hoping.) That was obviously not the expected response he had been hoping for. “No. The attorney told me to tell you that he will pay $500/hour, and if you don’t accept it, he can subpoena you, and you’ll get paid a lot less than that.”

Is that a threat? I think it was. Oh well. I told him I would check with the doc and see what he wanted to do. We ended up just accepting their approved fee.

So fast forward to the Wednesday afternoon just prior to Thanksgiving. Gopher Boy calls me and tells me that they will have an attorney in the area on Monday anyway and would we by any chance be able accommodate them by rescheduling the depo to that date. Dr. G didn’t care, so I called him back and told him we would be willing to do it then. I asked him if the other side would be able to make it by then because we did NOT want to have to do this depo twice. “We are only required to give them three days’ notice,” he said, “and we’ll take care of that this afternoon.” And thus, it was rescheduled.

Monday morning rolls around. I get a call from the Houston attorney, legal representative for the patient. He tells me that he is royally ticked (to put it politely) because he had just checked his email that morning and had thereby gotten his notice from the D.C. attorney, telling him that the depo had been moved up to that afternoon. The email had apparently arrived after they had left on Wednesday afternoon for their extended holiday weekend. No flight arrangements that could still be made could get him here for the scheduled deposition. He told me that he had filed an emergency order to quash the deposition, but the judge wouldn’t even be able to sign it until well after the deposition was scheduled to start. He said he would check into some things and call me back.

In the meantime, the D.C. attorney calls and says he will probably be late as he is flying in bad weather. He wanted to know if the doc would be available later, but we didn’t know.

Later that afternoon, Houston Attorney calls me back and tells me that the D.C. attorney agreed to cancel and go back to the original scheduled date of December 8. Fine by me. The Houston Attorney told me it was fine to even go ahead and cancel the stenographer. So I did.

Well, unfortunately, that was not the end of it. The Houston Attorney called me back even later and said that the D.C. firm was not amused that we had canceled the stenographer, and because they had given three days’ notice, they were going to proceed with the deposition as planned if they could get their attorney here and if Dr. G would still be available. So the Houston Attorney then resorted to begging ME not to let it happen. Talk about pressure!

I briefed Dr. G on the situation–no easy task. My personal opinion of the whole thing was that the D.C. Attorney had played the situation a little dirty, and therefore, I thought it should be canceled and rescheduled for the original date. So I begged the doc to just leave and go somewhere unreachable. He obliged, thank goodness. But then the D.C. Attorney called and said he had been rerouted to Atlanta, and he would not, in fact, be able to make it. Praise God! So the depo was officially rescheduled to the original date.

Fast forward to today, December 8.

Houston Attorney showed up at least an hour and a half early. He wanted to make sure he was here, I guess. When the D.C. attorney arrived about an hour later, I retreated to my office. I could hear most of what was being said out in the lobby. There were some heated exchanges going on, to be sure, and while it didn’t come down to physical blows, it was easy to see that the tone was not one of friendliness. I stayed out of sight as much as possible.

As the time of the scheduled depo drew nearer, I had this feeling the doc, who was making hospital rounds, was going to be late. And sure enough, he showed up about fifteen minutes late. And to top it all off, it had been raining, and the doc had had no raincoat. So he improvised, of course. He showed up in a big black garbage bag.

I had set up everything back in his office, and the attorneys, as well as the stenographer, were waiting to begin. I met him at the door to apprise him of the goings on, and I was a little alarmed when he took off for the office in his newly-acquired rain garb. I don’t know what rule it violates, but I’m certain it is not fashionable to show up at a deposition in a black garbage bag. “You might want to take your bag off,” I whispered. He ignored me and proudly marched off to show the two very uninterested attorneys his clever new wardrobe. I decided to just give it up.

I stayed as far away from the office as possible, although at one point, Dee and I peered through the crack in the door down the hall so that we could watch the stenographer. The stenographer was fascinating. She could type as fast as the conversation, about 165 words per minute. She, of course, has a special machine–not a regular keyboard. When I left at 5:00, they were still going strong. And from the sounds of it, the debate was heated and very intense.

I do not like depositions!!

No More English!

I handed in my research paper for English 300 this morning, and in so doing, have fulfilled all my English requirements. The deadline was not until 1:00, but I finally just quit at 11:30. I decided you have to just stop at some point, and since Lori had to leave by noon to go take a Math exam, I had to be at work to take over for her. There is always something else to include, something else to fix, something else to eliminate. And you just run out of time.

We were supposed to pick something in our chosen fields, so I chose to write on the different ways that pharmaceutical companies influence physicians to write their products. Although I felt like I just didn’t have enough time to devote to the topic, I felt pretty good about my final product. I spent many, many hours on it (and my other papers for that class), so that is why I’ve had no time to keep regular updates coming in.

I had an exam in my Economics class at 9:10, and with our English class not meeting at 8:00, I just studied for Econ till class started. It didn’t take too long to fill in the twenty bubbles for the exam, after which I went to the library to work on the paper until time expired. I spent most of my time trying to cite my sources and coming up with the proper parenthetical form. The nice thing is that the handing in of the research paper takes the place of a final. So I am now FINISHED with not just this class, but with all of my English requirements. I don’t mind writing, but researching stuff is a big pain, and citing the research is even worse.

I took my last Music test yesterday. In this class, if we have an A average after this test and have gotten in all our extra credit, we are exempt from the final. Mr. G told us yesterday that we MUST show up in class tomorrow to find out if we are in the cast of lucky ones to not have to take the final. “Do not call me,” he said. “Do not camp outside my home; do not come visit me in my office. Show up in class!” In fact, if we didn’t show up on Thursday, he said we should just plan on taking the final. Bah! So then tonight, he sends us all an email in which he lists those who do not have to take the final and goes on to say that no, because he is ahead of schedule, we do not, in fact, have to show up in class on Thursday. I keep going back and re-reading it, thinking there’s some sort of something that I’m misinterpreting. But oh well. I guess I’ll take him at his word and not show up after all.

So with my English finished and my Music out of the way, that leaves my Accounting test next Tuesday night and an Economics final next Friday. They’re spaced apart nicely, but they’re both real doozies! The Accounting final is a department final, which is very scary. And Econ? Econ, by its very nature, terrifies me.