You know, it’s been too long since I told a story about some fool at my job making a dumb request or otherwise confusing me as to how they’ve survived life as long as they have.
Working in a plasma donation center as I do, I’ve had some strange requests. I had a guy ask if he could get a piece of the tubing in his disposable set with his blood in it so that he could make a necklace out of it (I think Zimm had the same request from the same guy). I had someone ask me if he could be allowed to taste his plasma. I had a guy ask if the plasma tasted like urine, since that’s what it looks like (I don’t let other people taste plasma, but when they’re not looking? I’m all over it. Nothing says delicious quite like blood products, my friends). But I never got a request quite like a caller had today.
There was an employee in the front area who was on a phone call with a donor for a while this evening. The nurse noticed that she was getting a little frustrated answering the guy’s questions, and that the questions were of a medical nature, so he had the employee transfer the call to his office. About five minutes later, he comes to my door and says, “Hey, Tha Docta? Will you take this call? This guy wants his plasma back.”
Well, I figured it’d be an easy call, since that’s kind of a silly thing to ask, and I could easily explain why we don’t just give plasma back to people after they donate it. I was mistaken. He started off by telling me that he donated plasma about a year ago. He said that since it was his plasma, he’d bring back the money we paid him and we would give him the plasma back. I explained that the plasma was no longer in the center, as we ship it out every couple of weeks so that it can be used to make medical products, the likes of which I won’t detail just now. I told him that he had really already gotten his plasma back, because your body replenishes what you give in about a day. He told me that he wanted his plasma back because he felt “empty”. I told him if that was true (whatever the frick that even means), he needed to see the doctor, because it had less than nothing to do with his year-old plasma donation.
Somewhere along the way in this increasingly-annoying conversation, I mentioned that we keep the plasma frozen, and he said he wanted the phone number to the freezer place where we shipped it. The tone of the guy’s voice, along with his persistence in this matter, led me to believe he was screwing with me. So I asked him, “Are you…being serious right now? Because I’ve already explained that there’s no way you can get your plasma back.” He proceeded to call me names and tell me what he’d do to me when he came to the center. That gave me reason enough to end the phone call.
Unfortunately for me and everyone else, this fool called back, and this time they transferred him directly to me. He told me he’d be calling the police if I didn’t give him his plasma back. I was already past annoyance at this point, but I couldn’t help but laugh. I told him that would be fine, because if he wouldn’t listen to me, maybe he’d listen to them when they told him the same thing I had already said. I could have been a jerk to this guy more than once, but I never was, because it would give him a valid complaint against me, and it’s astounding how far that kind of thing can go. So it just wasn’t worth it. But anyway, I told the staff not to forward him anymore, and just to tell him if he called again not to call anymore and hang up. So if I end up on the next wannabe Jerky Boys CD, that’s the story.
In other news, our house has been on the market for three weeks, and it has shown a total of zero times. So as you can see, the Kokomo housing market is booming, people. Booming. I know there were some other things I was going to talk about, but for whatever reason, I can’t remember what any of them are. In the meantime, remember to check out my other writings at the Diary and at MMATorch.com. I’m planning on doing some brief assessments of new shows over at the much-neglected Eight Cents blog at some point, but I don’t know exactly when that will be.
And Joel, I’m with you. Once I get set up here in Fort Wayne, I’m all over live night again. It has been far too long since I’ve asserted my dominance over you and Zimm and Johnny. Unfortunately, Johnny feared my wrath enough to move to Thailand so that he could gather his wits before challenging me again.
Song of the Day: “Before He Cheats”, by Carrie Underwood. Despite being an “American Idol” nerd, I was never a big fan of Underwood. But this is a good song. She sounds all groweds up. Sultry, even. There’s a lot of other good music that’s come out recently and that’s on the horizon. Audioslave, Jet, OutKast, The Black Keys, and Beck are some of the acts that have new music out or coming out soon. I’ll surely be mentioning them later.
Ask Tha Docta
The first question I’ve gotten in a while comes from a concerned employer who happened to see my post on smelly people, and how I have to routinely tell people that they are too stinkified to donate plasma. Her question reads:
“We as management need to tell an employee about poor hygiene. Specifically the stench coming from the bathroom when she in finished using it. How can we tell her (in a nice way) about the problem?”
I am saddened to report that this question comes from a management member at a dining establishment. But back to your question, concerned reader.
To be blunt, there is no nice way to tell someone they stink. Obviously you don’t have to use that exact wording (unless you want to…the person in question will certainly get the point if you do), but however you put it, the person in question will hear, “you stink”. The best way to do this for you and for her is just to bring her in your office, sit her down, and tell her point blank that she has hygiene problems that she needs to address. It’s likely that she already knows she’s a little on the ripe side, and that she’ll take care of it when she realizes that people notice. But it’s important to be direct, and not to make light of it. The easiest way to offend the person is to say this kind of jokingly.
Now, as for the bathroom end of things (and we all know which end that is), do you have an air freshener in the bathroom? A powerful one? Because usually that will take care of the problem. But I’m assuming you’ve already tried this. So you have a couple of options here. You could put an “out of order” sign on the women’s bathroom, but knowing how worked up women get when the bathroom is out of order even for a short amount of time, this wouldn’t work. You could institute a company policy against solid waste, invent a female version of a urinal, and install only these female urinals into your bathroom, but that would be kind of expensive. So that leaves you with the option of having someone go into the bathroom at the same time as this person and continually spraying air freshener while she’s on the toilet. It sounds ridiculous, but I’m really only half-kidding here. If you don’t want to tell the person with words that her sh*t do stink (sorry—couldn’t help it), you could tell her with actions.
9 years ago
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