Pagers

One of the dubious features of being a doctor are our pagers.

When you’re a med student you can’t wait to get one.

After having one for anything longer than a week you spend significant amounts of your time alternately cursing it’s existance and thinking whether you could get away with flushing it (or smashing it, or burning it, or…).

One thing can be said about them though: They do provide some interesting insight into how some hospital staff view doctors.

Firstly you get paged all the time about quite ridiculous things (“The patient has a slightly low temperature, but feels fine, and feels warm when I touch them”, or “Can you come and finish filling out this paperwork” – “I’ve already done it” – “No you haven’t” – “Yes I have, here it is” – “Oh, sorry”).

Then you arrive at work in the morning or on monday (I leave my pager in my locker when I leave work) to find that people have paged me at 5:30pm. And 9:30 pm. And 2:00am. And on sunday when I’m not on call. And on public holidays when I’m not rostered on. I can never decide if they honestly think I live at the hospital, or if they’re just being hopeful (and they’re probably lucky I don’t take my pager home, because the best they could hope for was to be yelled at down the phone for waking me up at 2 in the morning).

It seems when I read what I have just written that I sound like a nasty grumpy bastard, but I have found recently that I have very little patience for people who waste my (now quite limitied) time, and you come to appreciate that a little bit of common sense goes an awfully long way, especially many of the people you deal with seem to fail to use any at all.