Wes has been living a comedy of errors for the past several weeks as he tries to become a licensed doctor in Illinois. This requires him taking the USMLE Step 3 and filling out a lot of paperwork. He has spent an untold amount of time on the phone (well, actually, it's told since we have a cell phone bill that shows exactly how many minutes he spent -- this is the only month he has ever talked on the phone more than me), and he still hasn't been successful. He's rather eager to get it done, as being licensed means he can get paid for moonlighting in the EDOU (observation unit) at $80 an hour. Until he is licensed, he just works there are part of his regular shifts for his regular pay.
You'd think that a group of people with 20 or more years of education wouldn't have such a hard time doing something like this, but every single person in his class has had the same problems. Wes made if further than anyone. Several fellow doctors are licensing in California, where the process is easier, and then they can change it to Illinois through a much less grueling process. But Wes has persisted in Illinois.
After pulling together any insane number of documents and submitting a hefty check, Wes called last week to find he still had not done everything right. Although he had submitted all of the paperwork successfully, he had sent his USMLE Step 1 and 2 scores to the "federation" and not to the USMLE Step 3 people. Now, it would seem entirely reasonable that the USMLE 1 and 2 people would be the same as the USMLE Step 3 people, or that they at least freely shared information. But no. And on the day Wes called to learn that the scores had been sent to the wrong place, he also learned that USMLE Step 3 people had to receive his test scores by the very next day or his whole application would be returned while the office closed for a month and changed the application procedures. So Wes called the USMLE Step 1 and 2 people who forwarded the scores electronically that very day. Only when Wes called back later in the day to verify that they had been received, he learned that Illinois was the only state in the country that would not accept the scores electronically. So he called back to the USMLE Step 1 and 2 offices and asked them to overnight the scores. Except Wes could not give them a check that day to pay for the overnight services (and evidently they couldn't take a credit card over the phone), and so his scores might go out the next day if there happened to be an overnight package going. Could he call back the next day to verify if that had happened?
So he waited, fortunately accepting this all with some humor. Yesterday, while he was on the phone with Dell, he got a voicemail from the USMLE Step 3 office. I would transcribe it word for word if could (ending with "If you have any questions, please call the federation's office at ###), but the gist was that they received his test scores (which are in the top 1% of the country) one day late. One day. Consequently, while they could approve his application, they would have to return his paperwork to take the USMLE Step 3 test, and he would have to wait until the end of September to reapply to take it. The new fee is $100 more. And, oh, once the policies change -- he'll have to send his test scores to the federation, which is what he had done in the first place.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
And another one bites the dust
I have not had the world's best history with computers. The first laptop I ever owned was stolen on one of the safest college campuses in the country. The second one turned out to be a lemon, and by the time it became clear that whatever was wrong wasn't fixable, the company had gone bankrupt. But even in these two instances, I've never had a computer completely "crash," where one day things were working pretty hunky-dory, and the next nothing.
Well, now I have. Our desktop computer, the one we primarily use and on which Wes has all his information saved, is fried. I came home on Thursday when Wes was at work, turned it on, and got a message to the effect that something really important that makes the computer work at all was either missing or corrupted. The missing made Wes nervous; the corrupted made me nervous.
Wes made some phone calls to both the Geek Squad and Dell. The former was going to be very expensive and would not have included any subsequent parts that needed purchased. The latter, fortunately, turned out to be just the opposite. Turns out when I bought the computers, I paid an extra $100 or so for an extra 3 years on our one-year warranty. We are in that last year. And since Dell is a big, established company, they haven't gone bankrupt. Wes talked with a lady for an hour. When she couldn't figure out what was wrong, she got a supervisor. When, after an hour, they still couldn't fix the problem, they told Wes that someone would be out next week with a replacement hard drive -- at no additional cost.
The good news is that we won't have to spend any money to fix this problem. It makes me nervous that we had a computer working fine one day and dead the next, but I'll chalk it up to the issue of that hard drive and not the company's computeres in general. The very, very bad news is that we had almost nothing on that computer backed up. We lost our music, which isn't a big deal since most of it was from CDs we own or can be repurchased from ITunes pretty cheaply (and some of it's sitting on our IPods). We lost all of Wes's documents, and I'm truly shocked he's not more upset about it than he is. He just says, "What can we do about it?", but I know it's got to upset him -- his files contained all of his medical school work, residency tests, papers he's written, including the text for the chapter that will soon be published, and data for current research. He has a few things saved on his jump drive, but not much.
The saddest part of this is that we lost all of our digital pictures from the past two years, including everything since we moved to Chicago. As we got to talking, we did realize that a lot of our most beloved pictures are either on the blog or on CDs we gave to family members who wanted to those same photos. I will be emailing those family members immediately to try and get the CDs back. I guess that is the one benefit to digital images -- not only could they have been backed up somewhere, but they kind of are in different forms.
Wes and I have learned our lesson about backing up our information. Since all my old files are saved on the laptop (which we're using in the interim -- thank goodness we own two computers) and my jump drive, I will be backing those up TODAY. Please take this lesson from us if you don't practice this habit already yourself.
And if you have any of our pictures -- or Wes's files! -- would you send them along?
Well, now I have. Our desktop computer, the one we primarily use and on which Wes has all his information saved, is fried. I came home on Thursday when Wes was at work, turned it on, and got a message to the effect that something really important that makes the computer work at all was either missing or corrupted. The missing made Wes nervous; the corrupted made me nervous.
Wes made some phone calls to both the Geek Squad and Dell. The former was going to be very expensive and would not have included any subsequent parts that needed purchased. The latter, fortunately, turned out to be just the opposite. Turns out when I bought the computers, I paid an extra $100 or so for an extra 3 years on our one-year warranty. We are in that last year. And since Dell is a big, established company, they haven't gone bankrupt. Wes talked with a lady for an hour. When she couldn't figure out what was wrong, she got a supervisor. When, after an hour, they still couldn't fix the problem, they told Wes that someone would be out next week with a replacement hard drive -- at no additional cost.
The good news is that we won't have to spend any money to fix this problem. It makes me nervous that we had a computer working fine one day and dead the next, but I'll chalk it up to the issue of that hard drive and not the company's computeres in general. The very, very bad news is that we had almost nothing on that computer backed up. We lost our music, which isn't a big deal since most of it was from CDs we own or can be repurchased from ITunes pretty cheaply (and some of it's sitting on our IPods). We lost all of Wes's documents, and I'm truly shocked he's not more upset about it than he is. He just says, "What can we do about it?", but I know it's got to upset him -- his files contained all of his medical school work, residency tests, papers he's written, including the text for the chapter that will soon be published, and data for current research. He has a few things saved on his jump drive, but not much.
The saddest part of this is that we lost all of our digital pictures from the past two years, including everything since we moved to Chicago. As we got to talking, we did realize that a lot of our most beloved pictures are either on the blog or on CDs we gave to family members who wanted to those same photos. I will be emailing those family members immediately to try and get the CDs back. I guess that is the one benefit to digital images -- not only could they have been backed up somewhere, but they kind of are in different forms.
Wes and I have learned our lesson about backing up our information. Since all my old files are saved on the laptop (which we're using in the interim -- thank goodness we own two computers) and my jump drive, I will be backing those up TODAY. Please take this lesson from us if you don't practice this habit already yourself.
And if you have any of our pictures -- or Wes's files! -- would you send them along?
Sicko
Two definitions:
1. I've been a bit under the weather this past week. On Labor Day, I sat at my computer writing lesson plans and could slowly feel my throat get sore, the fever come on, my body start to ache. And then it just wouldn't leave. Despite close monitoring by my personal physician, it took a full week to shake it. I was just a little feverish every day, just a little clammy, just kind of fatigued in general. I sneezed explosively, slept sitting up to fight sinus congestion, and took lots of Sudafed. I wasn't ever sick enough to not go to school, but always sick enough to just feel exhausted. I feel legitimately better today. It'll be Monday before my energy is back, but no more fever, and the horrible headache from last night is gone, at least for now.
2. There are just some wrong, wrong people in this world. I blogged previously about a student who was viciously attacked by her much older boyfriend. Yesterday I had another student come in and show me the four staples in the back of her scull that she got after a group of girls attacked her with crow bars in the yard outside her home. These are sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls. What is wrong with people?
1. I've been a bit under the weather this past week. On Labor Day, I sat at my computer writing lesson plans and could slowly feel my throat get sore, the fever come on, my body start to ache. And then it just wouldn't leave. Despite close monitoring by my personal physician, it took a full week to shake it. I was just a little feverish every day, just a little clammy, just kind of fatigued in general. I sneezed explosively, slept sitting up to fight sinus congestion, and took lots of Sudafed. I wasn't ever sick enough to not go to school, but always sick enough to just feel exhausted. I feel legitimately better today. It'll be Monday before my energy is back, but no more fever, and the horrible headache from last night is gone, at least for now.
2. There are just some wrong, wrong people in this world. I blogged previously about a student who was viciously attacked by her much older boyfriend. Yesterday I had another student come in and show me the four staples in the back of her scull that she got after a group of girls attacked her with crow bars in the yard outside her home. These are sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls. What is wrong with people?
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