It seems in this day and age folks just don’t have time to talk in full sentences, and they certainly ain’t even gonna bother with typing out entire words.  

When I first came across a post about Connie Jackson, it said she was gonna be on DHC.  Was that one of the home shopping networks?  There’s a line of beauty products made with olive oil that goes by that name.  I finally had to click on the article to figure out what the hell she was talking about.

A few weeks ago everybody was wishing me a happy MLK day.  I thought it was a new holiday celebrating milk.  Come to find out they were abbreviating Martin Luther King Day.  So when asked how I celebrated MLK day I replied, “I drank some chocolate milk.”

I miss words.  Today’s broken and severely shortened English just manages to confuse the hell outta me.  It’s like some cryptic Morse Code that noone’s bothered to share with me.  And if I’m confused, just imagine what it must be like for a foreigner.  Maybe I should write a book: Talking to Americans for Dummies.

It took me a month to get my Upper GI results faxed to the surgeon’s office.  I must have called at least a dozen times:  Gave them all the information, blah blah blah and, “Ok, we’ll get that right out.” Or, “I’ll fax that off to ‘em right now.”  And nothing.  In fact it was made extremely clear that the results had to be faxed to the surgeon’s office in Fresno.  They even bothered to make a copy of this request for their records.

Salinas Valley Imaging Center is notorious for communication breakdown.  You have to ask everyone you meet from the doctor to the janitor, to please send the results to my physician, and in most cases that still doesn’t work.  

So what the hell am I supposed to do?  The office gal in Fresno told me to just keep trying and tell ‘em it’s important.  Well I’ve been doing that and I’m a lil tired of trying; this approach is clearly not working.  Then I thought of a plan and wrote down my lil spiel so I wouldn’t falter halfway into the conversation.

Here’s what I said:

Hi there!  My name is Erica and I work for the Advanced Bariatric Center over in Fresno for Dr. Felix and Dr. Swartz.  One of our patients Elizabeth Brooke Lee had an Upper GI performed on December the 6th at your office, and it’s imperative we receive those results so that Dr. Swartz may determine what options are best for her and that the patient can continue in her quest for surgery. 

Our fax number is area code 559-446-6288  and that’s attention to Erica.

Not ten minutes later Erica called me to say they just faxed the results over.  I was rather proud of myself.