One of the consequences of carrying the hospital ophthalmology on-call pager is that you end up becoming the primary eye consultant for anyone who knows your number. ANYONE. This includes people outside the hospital’s referral network.

Last week I received a call from a gynecologist who worked at the hospital but was 2 hours away. She noticed that her eye was  “bloodshot”, and described to me signs of a subconjunctival hemorrhage. Of course there was nothing I could do except offer her a ticket to my emergency room if she wanted an examination. She declined.

On Saturday morning at 4:30am, I received a page from the hospital’s cardiothoracic (CT) surgery fellow worried about his own red eye. I had just stepped foot in my apartment 10 minutes earlier, after a horrible slew of ED consultations. I asked him to drop by our weekend clinic at 8:30am for examination, but he stated that he was scrubbing into “a case” and probably would not be finished until 10am.

As angry as I felt for being paged for likely non-emergent personal consultations, I actually felt sorry for the CT fellow.

Then I realized the reason for the high volume of non-emergent calls is that people, no matter how educated they are, know very little about the eye. Who knew that you shouldn’t wear daily contacts for 4 days straight? Yes, if you wear inch-thick eye liner, some of it will get into your eyes.

I guess that’s why ophthalmologists still have jobs.

medicine rant

Every year, the Academy of Ophthalmology holds an annual meeting that most ophthalmologists attend. Those that are usually left behind are junior surgeons who end up covering the on-call pager.

I was unfortunate to be covering the primary pager for the hospital this weekend, which is Academy weekend. Generally speaking, this is the worst weekend to have an eye problem, because your primary ophthalmologist is probably out of town in a meeting (or getting drunk). My pager rang early yesterday morning with a long distance callback number. Bad news. When the emergency room or floor resident pages me, I usually receive the hospital extension. A long distance number always means that you’re getting shit that you don’t want to (and should not have to) deal with.

The call turned out to be from one of my attending’s wife. She woke up with an itchy eye and foreign body sensation. Her husband was at the AAO meeting in San Francisco, and she did not wish to bother him with a call. Her son-in-law, daughter, nephews, and nieces were all ophthalmologists at the meeting as well. Her primary ophthalmologist was in town, but she did not wish to bother him either because it was Saturday (Jewish sabbath).

WTF?

I suppose that leaves me, the on-call resident. I offered advice to the best of my abilities over the phone and offered to see her in the emergency room (the one where patients wait 4 hours to be triaged). She politely declined.

Lesson to be learned: if everyone in your family is an ophthalmologist except you, you should go with them to the Academy meeting.

medicine ophthalmology, rant, work

Several months ago, I wrote about Twitter spam or a variant of unwanted traffic on Twitter. Since then, it’s still not clear to me what motive these spammers have. Several weeks ago, I posted a link to the NYTimes about swine flu vaccinations. Minutes later, I received Twitter notices that I just garnered four new followers–all of them had an odd username, like a common first name followed by several numbers.

Great. While I’m all for having a large crew of loyal followers, it does no good that my followers are all bots. I actually not sure what purpose these bots serve anyway, because none of their Twitter pages link to any spam websites. As Mashable.com mentioned in their Twitter article, spam on Twitter comes in three flavors: Twittermercials, straight cons, and clueless cons.

While most of the spamming I’ve encountered are Twittermercials, the most recent iteration of spam doesn’t appear to serve much of a purpose other than harvesting data on my activity.

Fortunately, the coders at Twitter monitor these unsolicited activities often, and most of the spam accounts have been deactivated.

computing computing, tech

Several days ago at the Delta terminal of LaGuardia Airport, I heard a familiar whirring of a machine that sounded like a continuous tear of  paper. As I glanced around the waiting area, I caught a glimpse of a cabinet underneath a kiosk where the sound of emanating from.

Indeed, the sound originated from a dot-matrix printer, happily churning out piles of connected paper with terminal-sized font.  I wondered why anyone would still be using technology from the 1970’s, but given that it’s the airline industry (airline tracking radar from 1970’s), I wasn’t too surprised.

But still, why not upgrade? The only other time I’ve seen a dot-matrix printer in operation is in the fire-alarm system of the research building.

I suppose that dot-matrix printing still has its merits. As long as the printer paper doesn’t jam, the system is virtually indestructible. A power source and a serial/parallel connector is all you need to print away. Sure, dot-matrix font is shitty, but the ink ribbon rarely needs to be replaced. Given that the fire alarm printer is locked behind a glass window, I doubt that it ever gets serviced either. Ultimately, I suppose that dot-matrix printers still have a niche: reliability with low maintenance and reliability over quality.

Still, I don’t see myself getting one of these devices anytime soon.

computing travel

I remember when Instant Messaging flooded the workplace computers back in the tech-boom days. My colleagues working at IBM would get company-wide emails stating that IM decreased productivity and was prohibited. When company threats weren’t heeded, port 5190 was blocked on the company firewall.

Now that instant messaging has been superseded by text messaging and MMS, I see my colleagues “texting” away during conferences and lectures. It’s become a nuisance. If you’re simply notifying your spouse that you’ll be late for dinner, that’s one reason to be texting during fluorescein conference. However, checking the stock ticker? Chatting with your medical school classmate? What are you thinking? That is simply abusing technology. Perhaps I say this only because I don’t have a data plan on my phone, but there is a point in which your attention should be directed toward the lecturer and not your iPhone.

Our eye clinic is in the basement, where our cellphones unreachable by the outside world. You’d think that there wouldn’t be any contact with the outside. Wrong. Last week one of the technicians (who are supposed to be obtaining visual acuity for our patients) was logged onto her MySpace page. Another computer was logged onto Facebook.

I wonder how much social networking affects workplace productivity. A quick search online shows that this actually increases productivity. USAToday also states that we work better with social networking… The caveat? None of these companies are involved with healthcare.

computing, medicine rant, tech, work