Back to School

It's a new semester, and I still don't have a job yet (besides the shoe store). I spent most of the day applying for jobs again, and the last one (a hospital) had an online application process that seemed like it would never end.

I hadn't applied there before, so I had to fill out a profile, then upload my resume, which it tried to import into all the appropriate application form boxes. Unfortunately, it messed up some of my job experience, so I had to straighten that out and look up street addresses (which are meaningless for the businesses that don't exist anymore). After I entered my business references, it felt like I was on the home stretch.

The next page was the demographic questions. I rushed through this, because it was time to leave for the first night of my Medical Billing class. I clicked "Decline to state" for Sex, Race, and Military, then I "signed" my name. Only to learn that there was a survey to fill out, which was required, or your application wouldn't count.

The survey was 6 pages long, with questions that you had to Strongly Agree, Agree, Neither Agree nor Disagree, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree with. Questions like, "I'm hard to get along with," and "I'm easy to get along with." When I finally finished it, they followed it with another attempt at getting me to tell them I'm a white girl who hasn't been in the military and hasn't been in jail. Then they made me promise to let them do a background check and credit check on me. And somewhere along the way, I realized I was applying for a job at the hospital that's farther away from me than I wanted to go (I thought it was at the closer one--the names are similar). But I'd come too far to just cancel at that point.

The application process finally let me go at 5:55pm. So I was 20 minutes late for my 6:00 class.

My class is free (paid for by the State of California, which is now about bankrupt, so there's no telling how long these classes will continue to be available), but the textbook costs $115. Swell!

Since nobody had the textbook yet, we had an assignment to work on in class, and then or instructor showed us the first part of Michael Moore's movie Sicko. She introduced the movie in glowing terms, and a lot of the women in class cried where Moore intended them to. Not me, though. My ire at being forced to watch something I'd determined NOT to watch kept me from feeling bad enough for those poor people to even sniffle. We're going to finish the movie on Monday. Snarl!

I was ticked off the whole way home, and only a cup of tea calmed me down. Yes, our healthcare system can be pretty lousy, but healthcare systems in Canada and the UK and Cuba suck donkeys!

I'll be glad when the Sicko section of class is over and I can get down to the work of learning how to mistreat sick people by billing the evil insurance companies on behalf of the wicked physicians I hope to work for.

I think that's her point...