And the nurse shall hold a basin

We were told a few weeks ago that the practice is due for its official inspection in the next couple of months, so every spare moment has been spent cleaning even in the most inaccessible and unlikely places, and not just with the usual cleaning products but extra special ones. Even the inside of the safe is sparkling - the waiting room chairs have been sterilised before being polished, and even the clients were commenting that we seemed to have gone overboard with the bleach. And the most annoying bit about it is that nothing looks any different. But at least we were as sure as we can be that everything would be up to scratch. Then today a client brought in his dog who'd had a minor disagreement with a fence and had cut his ear. Now, ears have a very good blood supply and this, being no exception, was bleeding profusely. The owner was doing a very good job at mopping up and then .... the dog shook his head.

Several times.

It took the vet and I three-quarters of an hour after surgery closed to remove what we hope was the last of the blood from the premises; it had even sprayed inside the drawers. Only the strip light needs cleaning - it was too hot to do tonight, and we didn't want to risk it exploding.

The first cut is the deepest

Complacency is a Bad Thing. The Credit Crunch is starting to bite and I'm now down to just one job, which is a bit of a bugger. Not much point in remaining self-employed if my self-employment has gone. Poo.

It's not a public inquiry

Wow, I got it right!

One of my employers (sounds good, huh?) has recently relocated so the admin work I do for them has been somewhat chaotic ("Okay, who's hidden the stationary cupboard?") and I've been catching up with the backlog of invoices. When I'd paid the outstanding backlog of unpaid urgent bills I started going through the rest of the paperwork, and was alarmed to find a letter advising me of a change of bank account for one of the companies I'd just paid. Oh bugger, I thought. Where have I sent the money? I searched the bank's website to try to find out how to cancel a payment but failed; and there was nobody else in the office to ask. So I worried and fretted. The next time I was in the office I explained it all to a director who was very understanding, which was nice.

Then I came across a bill for the new account we'd opened (with the same company) with the original bank details listed, and not the account number to which the letter had advised payments should be sent. This seemed a little odd, and I heard distant alarm bells ringing. I went back to the director, armed with all the paperwork as evidence. He rang the company queryline; no, they knew nothing about a change of bank account; no the signatory on the letter wasn't employed by them.

It seems I'd uncovered a con! I'm so very very glad that I didn't send any money to the 'new' account number, only to the usual one; I hope BT (for that is the company I was paying) appreciate my suspicious nature, and that they're grateful for the information that someone's trying to divert legitimate payments to a fraudulent account.

You must remember this

Often people ring up to cancel appointments for one reason or another; often they can't find the cat, sometimes they've realised they can't make it and want to reschedule, sometimes they just change their mind. Sometimes they forget and just don't turn up.

Today was the first time we had a client turn up for the appointment but had forgotten to bring the dog ...

They seek him here, they seek him there

A while back the Boy asked me to get him some more pants and some particular work gloves when I was shopping, which I duly did. Of course the gloves were the wrong type, and the pants the wrong design, but I still had the receipts to return them and get my hard-earned money back. However for some reason I just can't manage to do it. I do the in-town shopping when I've finished my weekly morning accounting before I come home for the afternoon shift at the vet, and the first week I left the bag with the goods in by the computer where I'd put them to remind me to take them. The next week I decided to be clever and put the bag on my handbag so I couldn't forget them; but I was in a rush that morning and just grabbed my bag, leaving the carrier bag behind on the kitchen table. This week I knew I couldn't fail - I put the bag into my handbag last night so there was no chance of me leaving them behind. And it worked! When I reached work I carefully put the bag of gloves and pants on the car seat and went to juggle invoices.

It was a trickier job than usual, it being the start of a new financial year so a new spreadsheet was required (luckily Paul had prepared most of it in advance) and items transferred from last year's to this year's, repeating items listed, details of Purchase Orders added, and so on, as well as putting on the invoices that had come in during the week. So it took a while but all looked lovely when I clicked Save and went to do the same for the other company. Once that was done the post arrived and there was a new invoice to add to the first spreadsheet before I logged off and went to do the shopping. I clicked on the link to take me to the spreadsheet - and it had gone. The link had somehow turned into a shortcut to itself, not to the file. With rising panic I looked everywhere - how the hell could a file just vanish?

It didn't take long for me to realise I was beaten. "Paul, something seems to have gone horribly wrong here", and he came to see. And he searched fruitlessly too - on my computer and on his where he knows the layout better. Zilch. So we went to the server and explored the innards of the backup. Nada. It reluctantly acknowledged that yes, there had been a file of that name opened and edited this morning but no, it wasn't going to say what had become of it. We conceded defeat and rang our tame IT advisor, who talked us through the internal workings of the server and managed to locate a file with that name and it was duly returned to our computers. We tentatively opened it and ... oh joy! ...it was the right one! Except that all the morning's work I'd so carefully saved had been removed and it was back to the beginning again.

So by the time I'd re-input all the data it was far too late to do the shopping so the gloves and pants came home again. Maybe next week ....

Pounding away, pounding away

Friday was a very busy day. Ned and the Boy were Frogbound for the day so I walked the dogs before going to work to hold the hand of the trainee. I'm not sure that she's going to last. She's very nice and all that, but she's taking ages to get to grips with the job. When the person before me started she had five accompanied training shifts (15 hours) before having to go solo. I was luckier - I had eight (24 hours). The new girl had seven (21 hours), tried a solo shift and had to call me in to help, so was taken to the main branch for some intensive training. She had another 25 hours training during the week but still needed assistance on Friday morning. She's written the procedures in a notebook but doesn't refer to it, and stands staring at the computer screen waiting for it to tell her what to do while the waiting clients get fed up.

The trouble is that, although everything's quite straightforward, you do have to multi-task. A client will come into the reception area to buy something and immediately the phone will ring. The phone has to be answered (it might be an emergency) but the client who's there mustn't be ignored - you have to smile and apologise and if necessary take the phone client's number and offer to call them back in a few minutes. This is the PR side of the job and is very important. None of the things we have to do are difficult in themselves, but they do all tend to happen at once! Tomorrow she's supposed to be going solo for real - if she can't manage after all this training I don't think she ever will.

Anyway, I did the (very busy) afternoon shift (all appointments booked) on my own (apart from the vet for the second half of it) and felt a headache brewing. And it built and built. Nothing would shift it. It was still there yesterday, and when I woke this morning as well. Pound, pound, pound. Over the course of the day I tried ibuprofen, aspirin, feverfew and paracetamol, but nothing made any impression on it. The next step was going to have to involve sawing off the top of my skull to let the pain out.

Now it's just getting dark, and the pain is starting to ease up a bit. What a washout of a weekend this has been.

The clinking, clanking sound

Every week the takings are counted and balanced against the till sheet. Sometimes it balances exactly. Sometimes it's a few pence up or down. This week the cheque takings balanced exactly, as did the credit card takings. The cash takings, however, were exactly £50 down.

Now, that's a huge sum to go astray. It's more than I spend on a week's food for three adults. It's nearly a week's income. There are several possibilities.

1) A client reached into the cashbox and took it.

Unlikely. There are very few times that the cashbox is unattended, and it would mean lifting the coin tray to reach the notes beneath, removing a minimum of three notes but leaving the rest and returning to one's seat without being noticed.

2) One of the staff took it.

I didn't. That I can say for sure. And I don't think any of the others did either. I'm the 'junior' and I've been there for 18 months and we've never had this problem. And I don't mistrust the trainee we've taken on this week either because I find it hard to step back and let someone learn the ropes and tend to hover annoyingly and help, so there was no opportunity for her to swipe it either.

3) It's an accounting error.

This is my last hope. Possibly someone's mistaken an 8 for a 3, or a 7 for a 2 - when scrawled hastily they're very similar, and there's a difference of 5 between them. The problem with that is that, in this particular week, we never took as much as £50 in a single cash transaction - unlike the following week when we took four times that amount in cash in a single day.

We've searched the till and the drawer it lives in and the safe and checked and double-checked and triple-checked the books. No sign. And it makes me feel sick.

Ned says I'm 'going down, and'll dance the hempen jig'.

What's new, pussycat?

Today a woman brought her cat into work, saying that it had been in a fight with a car and had lost; she didn't know how to dispose of it, and could we 'get rid' of it for her? A little suspiciously, we took the bag she handed us - recoiled slightly and asked when the cat had died. "Last Thursday."

Anyone know of a really effective air freshener?

It makes the world go round

Wahay! I've had a payrise!

Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking

You just know you're not going to get away on time when, with only a quarter of an hour of surgery time left, the boss suggests that a client should 'pop back' and get their other animal for examination, and the client lives twenty minutes away ...

If only overtime was paid at a higher rate.

In July the sun is hot. Is it shining? No it's not

It's been a tad on the damp side today, giving rise to memories of Easter a few years ago.
Luckily this isn't our driveway; that's meant to be a stream going under a bridge, not a stream going over a bridge.
You can get a hint of the speed of the flow from the fields and ditch to the left on the drainage on the right of the road.
In fact it was so damp that instead of the really busy afternoon I'd been expecting it was deathly quiet, because the vet couldn't get to the village for aftrnoon surgery and I had to ring and cancel all the appointments - the ones that hadn't already rung me and cancelled because they couldn't get to the village either ...

Oddly, however, there was a lot more traffic than usual in the village, and I got my entertainment watching juggernauts and buses causing gridlock in the narrow main street. Apparently there were landslips onto the M40, so that was closed, and all the long-distance traffic was having to use the lanes again. Boy tried to get to a friend's house about eight miles away and only managed to get four miles away before his car died and a pal towed him home. Then they went out again in a 4x4, no doubt hoping to make a few quid by towing people out of puddles. At least they're together and shouldn't come to too much harm, surely?

Now, as soon as Ned gets back from Cheltenham (he set off at about 1.30 and it's now ... ooh let me see ... 7 o'clock) I'll be able to relax.

Auf Wiedersehen, adieu

Phew! The locum quickly proved to be totally unsuitable and was given the order of the boot before being due to come to the village surgery for 'my' shift (and after I'd been brushing up my Greek - Ouzo, retsina, "exo skilio" - too). So normal chaos is resumed.

Ocean of motion

Things seem to be lurching from bad to worse at the vets' since the practice changed hands. in the Old Days there were three vets; the practice owner and two others who shared the workload and all knew what they were doing. Now pissups and breweries spring to mind. First the new owners (both vets) were unaware that they needed to renew certain licences so no Pet Passports or farm work can be done, thus hacking off all the farm clients. Then they said that because they live miles away and don't want to disrupt their children's schooling they can't do all the hours that the boss used to do, so the others must cover. (Very popular as you can imagine.) I hear that one employee burst into the local where a chillingly polite meeting was going on (public place for safety) shrieking that she couldn't cope any more! Now they've employed a locum who not only doesn't speak English but also can't work the computer, so we untrained receptionists are going to have input everything that this vet does so that invoices are correct. This will have to be done in the consulting room at the same time as we're in the reception dealing with the clients out there. As there's only one of us on duty at a time this could be interesting.

*Goes to study the Sits Vac.

I still don't know what I was waiting for

I've jumped on the apparent bandwagon of work-related upheaval that seems to have recently affected so many people. For several months my vet-boss has been trying to sell the practice, and after many hold-ups and set-backs and tears and tantrums (and that was only the solicitor) the sale was finally completed and yesterday lunchtime I ceased to be employed by XYZ Veterinary Surgeons and became an integral part of ABC Veterinary Practice Ltd.

Now the fun starts. Because nobody knew when – or even if - the sale would happen we’ve been pottering along, business as usual, and we weren't allowed to mention the possibility of the sale to the clients. But now when clients ring up to book an appointment with the Old Boss we have to explain that he no longer works in the practice; unfortunately because it’s (apparently) so sudden they think he’s been struck off or something, so we go into the spiel about the sale and how the practice is merely under new ownership.

Some clients will no doubt leave because they liked Old Boss (there’s one with an appointment on what would have been Old Boss’s rostered day this week, who’s going to be stunned) and others who didn’t like him (he’s best described as an ‘acquired taste!’) might well return. The wife of the new owner, who’ll be doing the actual vet stuff, has yet to make an appearance!

The computer system seems not to have been changed overnight, although the credit-card machine has (New Boss explained to m’colleague that “it’s like the ones restaurants use.” To which she replied in a bewildered tone “I have a father and a husband. I don’t pay in restaurants.”), and we have to remember to answer the phone differently. That could take a while to get into the swing of, and I confidently predict that I’ll use my home number in answer before I remember the new name.

And we’ll need new uniforms, and all the printers will need the letterheads and label details changed, and new business cards, and all the notices will need redoing, and … and … and …

Chaos and confusion will be the order of the day for some while yet!

Dipping in the pocket of her raincoat

An eventful day at work. The morning shift included a woman who turned up randomly with her dog to see the vet a full 20 minutes after the vet should have left, but luckily we'd been having a cuppa and a gossip so there wasn't a problem. Within 10 minutes the dog had been referred to the nearest eye specialist (an hour's drive away) with the owner in utter shock. Two days ago the young (3½ years) terrier cross was fine - today it's blind in one eye and the other is affected. Tomorrow it has to have the blind eye removed and is on medication to try to save the other. Primary Lens Luxation is hereditary - don't believe those who tell you that crossbreeds don't suffer from hereditary conditions. That's total tosh.

In the afternoon another woman burst into the waiting room in a panic, asking for a vet to come out to a dog she'd run over in xxxxx Road. I live in xxxxx Road - my automatic response was "What sort of dog?" - not the question she was expecting. On being told "A spaniel" I could cope (phew, not mine!) and all went smoothly from there. (Not a great prognosis, apparently.)

I'm emotionally drained.

Don't leave me hanging on the telephone

Why is it impossible, with a landline phone, to hang up and get a clear line when someone's called you with a mobile? Boy didn't believe me, but I showed him that, if the caller with the mobile doesn't cancel the call, the landline phone can't get a clear line again, no matter how many times you hang up the receiver. It's infuriating when it happens to your home phone (when your Beloved has the mobile in his pocket and all you can hear is the sound of his rhythmic stride), but it happened at work and I had to spend a full 20 minutes shouting and whistling and desperately trying to attract the attention of the mobile owner. Silly twit had accidentally speed-dialled the vet's number without realising. I hope nobody wanted to contact the vet urgently.

It was on a Wednesday morning the electrician came

If only he had. It was a tumbleweed day at work. There were no appointments booked, which in some respects was lucky because we'd had a letter to say that an engineer would be call to change the electricity meter, so the power would be off for half an hour. We'd phoned to confirm a convenient time-slot and to stress that there would be nobody there between 12 noon and 3pm; the woman on the other end of the phone duly marked the jobsheet. During surgery hours the vet and I chatted, then she went off to another surgery and I waited. At noon I went home. When I returned shortly before 3pm to open up again I found the engineer's card saying that he'd called at 12.20.

During the afternoon I was telephoned by the company to arrange another appointment. We agreed a date, and then I was asked whether morning or afternoon would be most suitable. As both are extremely inconvenient (no power means no computer, so no being able to book appointments or issue medication or sell anything) I decided on the morning.

"So the engineer will call between 8am and 1pm, madam."
"No, there'll only be someone here between 9 and 12"
"Yes, between 8am and 1pm"
"No, 9 and 12. Those are the times there'll be someone here."
"I can only book between 8 and 1, madam."

Who knows of a good wall-repair man? I seem to have made a head-shaped dent in the one by the phone.

It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it

In my job I have to be very diplomatic and know my place (that of ‘minion’) which makes it extremely difficult to watch someone taking a course of action which has been advised by others but seems to me to be the wrong thing to do (because it isn’t working), where a much simpler and cheaper method (frequently advised by specialists) exists which will either solve the problem or prove that the problem has a different cause. Today my tongue has been well and truly bitten. The saddest thing is that the victims don’t deserve it. Surely there’s a way I can orchestrate an accidental meeting with the person and put my idea forward – but if it gets back to Big Boss it’s possible it’d be construed as disloyalty.

Stuff it. A brief chat in passing wouldn’t do any harm, would it? I simply can’t stand idly by and not try to help. Although I wouldn't class myself as an expert, I do have 30-odd years of adult dog-ownership under my belt and do know alternatives to conventional wisdom. I hate possible conflicts of interest.

There's a change in the air

It seems to be interview time. Ned had one today which seems to have gone well, but he’s not sure what to do. The workplace is a lot closer – at least an hour cut off each journey – it’s days rather than nights, but 5 rather than 3, and for a salary cut of £5000. Hmm.

After his interview Ned went to the site of a virtual cache that we thought we might as well get in the bag while he was in the right town and I was at home. No problem getting to the right place – the hassle is that the captured pic’s no good because the sun was in the wrong place. Bah!


And I have a follow-up interview tomorrow, having been recommended after the preliminary one I had last week. It sounds like the sort of thing I can do; proof-reading and inputting amendments, and liaising with graphic designers, for educational publications. It’s not quite full-time, but rather more hours than I was doing before – I’ll have to see if I can manage the hours to suit me, because I don’t want to leave the dogs all day, 5 days a week. Anyway, let’s see if I get offered it first, eh?

And The Boy’s just phoned up nearly in tears because at the moment they’re doing electronics and he’s never done it before, even at GCSE, and he’s completely lost starting at degree level. He’ll work on a particular calculation for 4 hours, and still get it completely wrong. I think unless his tutor can help him get this sorted, he’ll be one of the percentage who drop out. He says he doesn’t want to, but he can’t afford to throw money down the drain, doing something when he’s doomed to fail. He's seeing his tutor tomorrow morning, so I hope he'll get some help in getting out of this mire. I'm possibly seeing him tomorrow as well, so maybe we can get something sorted out.

I spent today attempting to identify 'product' that would be suitable for our hoped-for assault on the Amerikaland market. Not as easy as it sounds. I mean, what is at the top of US stairs? A whole lot of nothing-ness, it appears, which must be daunting when you want to get to your bedroom. British stairs ascend to the landing, which is safe and sensible, as it should be. Use of US/UK dictionaries and Googling can find me no reference to the equivalent structure.

And what do their poor schoolchildren have to keep their pens, pencils and crayons in? I had a pencil case for mine. So did all my friends (not my pencil case, obviously - they all had their own). But such things don't seem to exist across the Great Divide. And what do they wear on their feet when it's raining? Not good old wellies, apparently. Tcha! And people go running in tell-tales or something. It's a minefield.

Being quite security-conscious at work, the outer door of our building is usually kept locked, so we were very startled when a little old lady wandered into the office and demanded a bus pass. A strange request to put to a software company. If she'd wanted a mousemat there would have been no problem. She was adamant that she was in the right place, and got quite flustered when she had to be ushered out onto the street again.

Tonight, due to pointed nagging, I have striven and strived and strove and managed to move the Comments-wotsit from the top to the bottom of the post. Happy now, Mallikins?