Denied!

Oh, cruel twist of Fate!
Why doest Thou hate me so?

I was in the home stretch, getting my pre-op tests run yesterday morning. As I sat in the waiting room, the poor little lady with a walker next to me was told that her surgery was cancelled because her doctor was in a transplant surgery he couldn’t leave. I thought, “man, that sucks for her.”

Shortly thereafter, my surgery got cancelled because I had tested positive for strep throat over the weekend. Despite my bravery at taking a shot of penicillin in the ass on Saturday, the physician’s assistant told me “not enough days have passed for us to be sure the strep is gone. If we put in a breathing tube and the strep gets into your lungs it could kill you, blah, blah, blah.” I wish they would have had him come tell me that before they blew a vein in my arm while trying to draw blood.

So. After a crying jag; a call to Mom to cancel her flight (in which I used the word “clusterfuck”- yes, to my mother); and some leave-of-absence-paperwork cancellations; I’m back at work!

Yay!

Suspiciously, this was the first case of strep throat I’ve had in fifteen years. I blame my PA, who kept asking me if I couldn’t put the surgery off until June, so I could help finish our current project. Absolutely diabolical, the way he got his hands on a vial of strep to put in my coffee.

Oh yeah, and since I’m back for an unspecified amount of time, there’s been talk of me being able to help out on the value engineering for…Project B (a.k.a., The Worst Project in the History of Projects)! For those of you wondering, “what’s ‘value engineering?’”, (I have no idea where to put the damn comma/ double set of quotes/ question mark on that one. Suck it, Grammar Police.) it’s when you take a project and try to scale it back so that the budget goes down, effectively “crapping it up” so that the contractor can continue to make a profit at the expense of the quality of the building. I love this industry. Love it.

(When referring to "VE" in the architectural community, pay no attention to what Wikipedia says. It's "crapping it up," pure and simple.)