soapboxdiner

Doctors and lawyers and brains, oh my!

That's right, it is pop quiz time on Soapbox Diner.

Here's your question:

Does this picture represent:

a. A linoleum sample.
b. Exotic sands from the Orient.
c. A histological specimen demonstrating toxoplasmostic changes in brain tissue?

I'll give you all five seconds to think.
one hippopotamus.
two hippopotamus.
three hippopotamus.
four - time's almost up!
five hippopotamus.

So, did you all guess C? Crazy, no?

Yes, that's right - I'm brushing up on the pathology stuff for today's interview at the BIL. It's all quite fascinating and rather unnerving. I've never quite been able to understand how doctors can look at a thing like that and discern anything intelligible from it. It awes me, it does.

When I first started at the hospital way back in the days fresh out of school, I thought that doctors had to be the smartest people on the planet. The way their brains work, and the way they can diagnose things most of us have never even heard of? Inconceivable in my own little brain. Not that that makes doctors unquestionably wonderful people by any stretch - but what they do, for the most part, is truly staggering. Lots of doctors trade in most of their humanity when they get the "God card". Not all, but a lot.

Then I went to work for a small family practice law firm and got to see REAL intelligence at work. A wholy different kind of intelligence, to be sure. Lawyers have an amazing ability to twist and turn circumstances into pretzels. They can take a bad thing, and make it look good. They can take good things and make them look hideously evil. And they never say what they really think. On the first day of my employment at the firm, my boss said, "Carla, the first part of secretary is SECRET." I loved that.

I remember once - there was this case for which I had to prepare some interrogatories to send off. Make five copies us, them, the judge, records, etc etc. I was brand new to the field and hadn't quite set to memory where everything was to go. Boss came with post it notes and labeled them. On the copy for opposing, he put "Send to dummy." (which he, as an ex-Marine, affectionately called everyone and meant nothing by it.)

I forgot to take the post-it off the copy before I mailed it.

Oops.

Anyway. Doctors and lawyers - smart people. Funny pictures of things that look like countertop samples - weird.

I have some more reading up to do now in preparation for the interview.

Wish me luck!

9:32 am - 11.22.02
previous | next

Home | Archives | Profile | Notes | DiaryLand | Random Entry