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beige_alertToday was the Medical College’s annual “Employee Service Awards” event, where employees who’ve worked at the college for 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, and 35(!) years were recognized. I can’t believe I’ve been here 10 years. I can’t believe I’ve been anywhere 10 years.
There are a shocking number of people who’ve been working on insurance forms for 15 or more years. If you ever wondered how we can spend so much money on health care in the United States without even caring for everyone, a vast army of people with jobs in the “HMO Group” working on some kind of coding for “charge capture” goes a long way toward explaining it. There were a very few people with jobs I actually understand, like running radioimmuno assays, doing organ transplants on mice, or carpentry, but it was mostly billing. “Charge capture” sounds like something that happens in the mass spectrometer when the ions collide with the neutral atoms or something, but apparently it has to do with billing.
There are a shocking number of people who’ve been working on insurance forms for 15 or more years. If you ever wondered how we can spend so much money on health care in the United States without even caring for everyone, a vast army of people with jobs in the “HMO Group” working on some kind of coding for “charge capture” goes a long way toward explaining it. There were a very few people with jobs I actually understand, like running radioimmuno assays, doing organ transplants on mice, or carpentry, but it was mostly billing. “Charge capture” sounds like something that happens in the mass spectrometer when the ions collide with the neutral atoms or something, but apparently it has to do with billing.
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Date: 2006-01-26 10:16 am (UTC)Time flow very fast and then are 10 years leave.
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Date: 2006-01-26 12:09 pm (UTC)Btw - what is it that you are doing? I never understood it from the random entries I sometimes read. Sounded to me like you're in a laboratory of some sort, but I might have got it completely wrong.
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Date: 2006-01-26 05:08 pm (UTC)Our lab provides services for the researchers at the college and, as they say, from around the world. Seriously, we have a regular protein sequencing customer in the Czech Republic.
We do protein sequencing to identify proteins. We make synthetic peptides, which are used for all sorts of experiments. We can separate complex mixture of proteins by 2-dimensional gels, or with gadgets like the Rotofor that I think you've heard me complain about. We have two mass spectrometers that we use primarily for protein identification. We sequence DNA. It's all the sort of thing most people only need to do occaisonally and which requires expensive equipment that's hard to use. People send their samples to us and let us deal with the expensive, unreliable toys.
I've worked in this one lab the whole time. The lab moved from the old building to the new one, my old boss quit and was replaced by a new one, and most of the old equipment is gone and replaced with newer, fancier stuff, but I'm still here.
By the way, my first boss, who I believe currently lives in La Jolla, California, grew up in West Berlin. And my current boss worked in Germany at one time and hasn't completely forgotten German, besides his native Arabic and fluent English.
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Date: 2006-01-27 11:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-26 01:54 pm (UTC)i remember when you were a sweet young thing.
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Date: 2006-01-26 02:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-27 06:31 am (UTC)*smooch*
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Date: 2006-01-27 11:23 am (UTC)And by the way - it's the mental age that counts. And I can calm you - you're mental age isn'g 35. (And now you may decide if that was a compliment... *g*)