*PPPPPHHHHHLLLLTTT!!!!*

I think one day I will post something positive again. One day. But not today. Not yet.

I just made one more phone call to the City of Detroit Municipal Parking Department Parking Violations Bureau. No dice. I can't even get the late fee taken off, thereby weaseling the $50 fine down to $30 without actually going down there for a hearing. I also asked what the infraction was on the ticket. Nothing exciting, just parking in a 'No Parking' zone. Sheesh.

We pretty much came to the conclusion over the weekend that the easiest and cheapest way to make this go away is to simply pay the ticket, and move on. At a birthday party we attended on Saturday, we found out this same thing happened about 17 years ago to a relative of my brother-in-law. And she was a recently divorced mother of a young child. $30 was kind of a hardship for her, but they made her pay it anyway. And my boss's boss, the Lab Director? Same thing happened to him a few years ago, only the ticket was from an out-of-state location...! The more I read and the more people I talk to, it's becoming apparent this is a fairly common problem.

Tim's brother Jim is an accountant in a suburb of Detroit, and will normally argue and contest something unfair to the moon and back. You do NOT want to play Scrabble with this man without a timer handy. When his advice was to just pay the ticket, we thought that was significant.

On an equally uplifting note, I found out something today that really burned my ass. Two weeks ago, we had an incident in the hospital where two nurses were involved in hanging the completely wrong unit of blood on a patient. Depending on what blood types are involved, this is usually a fatal mistake. Miraculously the patient lived. Had a severe reaction, but lived. After listening to the scuttlebutt and rumors, we had heard the two nurses involved had been fired. Not so. We heard this morning from a coworker they had merely been moved to another unit.

Needless to say we were flabbergasted. If you nearly kill a patient through blatant carelessness, shouldn't you at least receive a slap on the wrist?? Apparently they never even looked at the patient armband or chart or anything close to the patient. They read the blood unit tag at the desk. At the desk! Last time I strolled through a patient unit, the patients are mostly in their rooms. Hello, the unit is supposed to be read at the bedside...! But hey, I'm just a lab rat. I can tell you if the Blood Bank had not dotted their 'i's and crossed their 't's, and an incident was traced back to techs, heads would have rolled.

We think they should have been fired. But apparently nurses are so needed that even an incident like this isn't serious enough for their dismissal. Hey everyone, it's the perfect profession: become a nurse and instantly become covered in Teflon! Nothing whatsoever can stick to you and you immediately lose all ability to make any mistakes!!

If there are any nurses out there reading this, by all means, write. I'd really like to hear why and how you would never do anything so unbelievably careless. Tell me that the rumors we hear of how the practice of never bothering to check patient ID's is common in all hospitals are completely untrue.

Think I'll go to bed now. So I can go back for more tonight. Guess where I'm scheduled: Blood Bank/Hematology!