Residency started almost 3 weeks ago now. My first experience wasn’t quite as exciting as I had hoped. It began with the same thud that most jobs begin with…in a HR seminar. HR is the acronym for “Human Resources”. A dubious name that, in my opinion, precedes a dubious career field. HR oversees LOTS of regulations, and they lead a number of stunningly boring seminars, but otherwise I’m not sure what they do of value.
At one point, everyone in our HR seminar – me, my new resident classmates and a bunch of other new hirees – were required to sit at our tables and fill out forms. The room was hushed as everyone just tried to get through the forms as quickly as possible (“quickly” being relative, at this point).
One form, in particular, struck me as particularly interesting. It was a “past criminal history” form in which we were expected to disclose “any and all violations listed.” These violations, it turned out, weren’t of the ‘ran a red light’ here, ‘sprayed graffiti when I was a kid’ there, variety. Listed were HUGE crimes – major felonies that get you put in prison for life, etc.
As I read over the lovely list of atrocities, 2 questions came to mind:
1.) Would we BE this far in our careers if we’d done anything even remotely this BAD? And 2.) Did they really expect us to answer truthfully if we had done any of these?
With these questions in mind, I had to resist the urge to quietly walk up to the lady in the back of the room who was accepting our forms, and ask in a piercing whisper that everyone could hear, “Yeahhh…..uhhhhh…….I’m gonna need you to DEFINE abduction. Oh, also, there wasn’t a check-box for ‘leveled an entire city block with homemade napalm’, should I just put that in the margin?”
My daydreaming notwithstanding, it would take a few days before things became more interesting, which they did…but not before I learned that residency is often about doing things that have a logical foundation to them (check to make sure no new employee used weapons of mass destruction), but are silly from a practical standpoint (you can’t even get into medical school, let alone apply for residency, with a felony or even many misdemeanors on your record).
Thus, my conclusion after a week of orientation to residency: A hospital is frequently a silly, impractical place…but people often manage to get well there anyway.
