First off, I have to admit that I'm a terrible blogger. I was never really good at doing something consistently every single day, but I guess it is something that I will work on.

Well, back to the grindstone, I suppose. My next topic is a brave one. I will attempt to discuss my...dondondon...direct lab supervisor. She is the reason why we are all so quirky. I will start off by saying that Elizabeth is one of a kind...I'm talking snowflake one of a kind cause there will never be two snowflakes exactly alike. If I ever meet someone remotely similar to Elizabeth, well that's the day when she spawns a twin/clone. Hell could freeze over and Jesus could come back to Earth and still there would be no one like this woman.

The best way to put it is that she's very...hmmm...let's see...space-cadet...flighty...should've been a blond..She tends to remind me of those Quaker Rice cakes. Full of air. Don't get me wrong...she's a wonderful person, but i don't think she was ever made to be a supervisor over anyone. She'd just rather be friends with everyone.

So..this week we had a major inspection for the blood center. Everybody was all in arms with each other...high-strung...anal retentive, but necessary to get everything accomplished before the FDA and "The Infamous Europeans" come. Well, Elizabeth has been designated by our CEO Joe to make sure the validation for our fairly new computer system is completed and in order just in case they want to see all of our test runs before the system was installed...a three month process that included many frustrations, lots of hours, and many many mistakes! Anyway, Elizbeth finds that our test runs about two months ago never included any "fake" distributions to hospitals because there was, at the time, no way for the computer to distinguish between "fake" and "real" shipments.

Well, finally the computer people got things fixed and set up a system that was purely for validation, and a live system that we use everyday. Well, leave it up to Mrs. Elizabeth to create a whole different set of troubles! We all have to laugh because we've all done something completely ridiculous at the blood center, but she tops the list...so far!

Elizabeth starts doing her weekly audits on Monday and is usually through with them by Wednesday morning, or so. She checks things like our register which calculated how much money is being distributed in and our of our system to hospitals and then back to us. This is her main job on mondays, and she hates mondays...they are...shall we say, mundane.

So she gets this bright idea that on monday afternoon she will take a break from the registers and work on more computer validation junk. Well, she starts to ship, pack, and receive "fake" blood to and from our center and hospitals and by the end of the day she has made remarkable progress. About 70 orders total, so she leaves for the day. As everyone piles in on tuesday morning, however, the center becomes a ruckus and everyone is in a little tizzy. Jenny, on call, I think is in major panic mode because apparently quite a bit of blood never made is to some hospitals overnight, and they have scheduled major surgeries around what they thought would be a pleasant surplus of blood products. Those products never arrived, so many a phone call were made to the distribution office overnight. Chaos ensues. About 70 orders...real, not fake...orders of chaos. Yes, my friends, Elizabeth did all of her "fake" validation in our live system, therefore those 20 O negative units that were needed in a trauma that happened overnight, those she thought were merely a test, actually appeared in on the main hospital's computer system and many many other horrible accounts of the blood that never made it to many other hospitals.

So I will say this...in short, many lessons were learned, large and painful headaches were medicated, and Elizabeth added 10 years of unneeded stress to her life. I think her hair got grayer because of this. You gotta love Lifeline.