Can I help you?

This afternoon, I had this amusing interaction with my supervisor.

She was telling me about something she was going to do, and inviting me to join her. She says to me, "I don't know what you're doing right now, but..."

I really wanted to quip, "That's funny, neither do I!"

Which is amusing on so many levels to me.

I could leave it at that, but then you, my reader, would have no idea what that meant or why it was so hilarious to me. So I will elaborate...just a little.

First of all, I had absolutely no plans for the day. In fact, most of my day was filled with making plans for tomorrow. I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants this afternoon when she caught me and I really had not made any immediate plans except to continue planning for tomorrow. Part of this is because I am still out of sorts with this restructuring of my program I am doing, still trying to figure out the best way to get it all done.

Secondly, as most everyone reading this little blog already knows, I really am very new to this particular area of this field. I have been working with this species less than a year. What cracks me up is that it is not that difficult for me to extend my background to allow me to inherently understand what I am doing. Last week, I overheard the new doctor talking about me to the office girl. She was marveling that I had only been working with these guys for eight months, I guess because I came off knowledgable to her. "I guess she's just a natural," she said.

The thing about that is, though, is that if someone has a firm grounding in animal behavior, it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch for them to be able to understand most animals. All animals communicate mostly through body language and some kind of vocalizations, and it is just a matter of determining the dialect, I guess. Initially, I remember trying to figure out what these guys were saying to me, but at this point, I translate without even thinking about it.

Body language is subtle to humans, because we are not trained to look for it, but if you spend a lot of time with animals, it is something that becomes intrinsic and valuable, not only as a source of information, but also in terms of safety.

When I was a kid, I remember people telling me that a horse's ears will be pinned back when it is angry. That is true, but if you wait until the ears are pinned back, it is probably too late to avoid getting hurt. You have to always be watching for the more subtle signs (tension in the body, shift in weight, the flicker of the ear, turning of the head or eye) and respond to those to keep from even being near a horse when the ears are pinned. There is also appropriate response, which is completely different if the horse is a "bluffer" or is truly aggressive. These are skills that become instinctual the more time you are around horses, and in that respect, it is the same across species. I respond to these guys' body cues now without even thinking about it.

Thirdly, I am just making shit up anyway here. The funniest thing about that is that I invented all this work to do just to keep myself busy, and now people ask for it, depend on it, double check it around here. That cracks me up all the time. I have a whole binder of documentation that could be audited at any time, but it is all stuff I feel like I sort of pulled out of my ass. Oh sure, one of my critical documents was an amended form of something that was left behind by a (big name) doctor that used to work here. Since he left, though, no one was using it to document this stuff, but suddenly now that I am using it, it becomes valuable.

Fourthly, this job is so vastly different than anything I have done before, it doesn't even feel like the same thing. I remember trying to explain this to the HR lady who was here, but she had absolutely no idea what it is like in the real world, so I couldn't frame it for her in a way she understood (probably because she was weird). A large portion of my jobs with the same title in the past involved a lot of client relations. At times I felt like a hostess, a grief counselor, a liasion between the client and the doctor who was trying to mediate middle ground between their contradictory wishes, a translator ("let me explain what the doctor is saying in layman's terms"), a humane educator, a pet and people trainer, a receptionist and "quote maker". A veterinary technician wears many hats during the course of the day.

Here you just take the client out of the equation. The volume and intensity of real work is significantly less. Cleaning, feeding, surgery assistance, patient care; it's all out the window.

Fifth, my supervisor could really care less what I am doing, as long as I am not bugging her. When I first started here, I had no idea what to do with all this rope. Usually doctors keep their techs on a short leash. We are their "right hand men", literally standing right next to them. They don't work on animals without us. The new docs sometimes get anxious when we are not around, because we hold their hands and help them. When they are not working on animals, we are usually scurrying around right near them, within earshot so that if they suddenly decide they need to look at an animal, they can pull our leash and we'll come running.

When I first got here, I was running circles around my boss asking her if I could help her with anything, but she kept sending me away. I got the drift. I never really work with her, we work independently.

She really has no idea what I am doing most of the time. She never asks me to help her, and I stopped asking her a long time ago.