Since it has been raining since, um, forever, and there's nothing new going on with the kids (those genetically mine and those assigned to me by the district), and the big party that's making me all angst-y hasn't happened yet, I figure this is the perfect time to dig into the Caroline archives and offer an anecdote from my storied past.
My first quote-unquote real job after undergrad was working as an "administrative assistant" (i.e., secretary) for a consulting firm of I/O psychologists. For those of you who stopped paying attention after Psych 101, I/O stands for industrial-organizational, and it means that instead of studying why a specific individual is batsh*t crazy, you study why entire groups of people (for example, your beloathed coworkers at your local cubicle farm) are crazier than sh*thouse rats (why small mammals of the mouse persuasion are so closely associated with mental imbalance, I do not know, but there it is). These I/O headshrinkers, being experts in workplace dynamics, were just about as nutty and difficult to work for as one would suspect. As an idealist and a neophyte to the World of Work I was horrified, just horrified, that there would be so much as a whiff of dysfunction in a consulting firm that was hired to ameliorate the dysfunction of other work sites, but that just shows you what I knew when I was 22 (f*ck all, if you couldn't figure that out for yourself). (I imagine the 22-year-old me was just a joy and a pleasure to have around as a subordinate, too. Ahem.)
Anyhoo, one of the founders of the firm was a Harvard Ph.D., and as the saying goes, you can tell a Haahvahd man, but you can't tell him much. Dr. F. was a brilliant man, but definitely of the absentminded professor/save the world but forget to put on trousers variety. Proof? He filed a lawsuit against his insurance company because he had a house that burnt down and HE had allowed the insurance to lapse because he ignored the bills in the mail. "Que?" I can hear you thinking on the other side of the flat screen, and you would be right, but to Dr. F.'s way of thinking, since he hadn't realized those were cancellation warnings in the envelopes with the bright red stripes on them, and he wasn't aware that he had fallen in arrears on his payments, then it didn't really happen! (That doesn't work for you or me, but then, we don't have Harvard degrees or the money to lawyer up and drag it through court, a fact that used to make me seethe with righteous indignation in my aforementioned young, idealistic, and hand-to-mouth days. Now I realize it's the way of the world, but back then it made my blood boil.)
I tell that story by way of illuminating the fact that this man just didn't do follow-through. The minutia of day-to-day living, like grocery shopping or paying bills or getting the oil changed, those just didn't register anywhere on Dr. F.'s consciousness. Naturally, he had a wonderful and dedicated admin named Leslie who handled most of that for him, but in a cost-cutting move, the partners decided they could no longer afford a secretary dedicated to only one partner. After she left, his work was divided among the remaining administrative staff. I landed the plum job of handling Dr.F.'s insurance billing for his private clients. As you can imagine, this was something of a rolling disaster. Dr. F. wasn't exactly stellar at the record-keeping aspect of the job, or at responding to questions about his records, but he was damn clear about wanting to be paid and he did not appreciate any holdups in his reimbursement - even when he caused them. And I was not naturally an organized or efficient admin, nor was I terribly motivated to become so (grad school and a couple of go-rounds with the FAFSA forms and a rigid financial aid director would fix that, but that still lay years in the future).
Enter Joe Schmo, Dr. F.'s newest private therapy client. Dr. F. had a small roster of private therapy clients on the side, just to keep his chops up. Mr. Schmo looked like a Brooks Brothers version of a successful businessman on vacation, all silver hair, polo shirts, and khakis. He roared up every Wednesday afternoon in a candy-apple-red Corvette that screamed either "drug money" or "midlife crisis" for his hour of therapy. Here's the weird part: While he was inside baring his psyche to Dr. F., his wife (a nice grandmotherly-looking lady with gray hair and elastic-waisted pants; not at all what one would expect given the car and the wardrobe) would sit in the car outside the office. Just sit there. For a whole hour. And cry. The whole time. "It's really weird," Sarah, our stylish London-born receptionist, whispered to me. "I keep asking her if she wants to come inside or needs anything, but she says no, and she just sits there and cries!" Needless to say, Dr. F.'s new patient and his lachrymose wife became our favorite enigma.
In due course, I had to fill out insurance reimbursement forms for Mr. Schmo. If you have any experience with mental health, you know that mental health practitioners live and die by the DSM-IV. Any diagnosis has to fit with a code listed in the DSM, and insurers base their reimbursement on whatever the condition is. So, while your least favorite in-law may indeed be crazier than a sh*thouse rat, if the DSM-IV doesn't recognize sh*thouse-rattiness as a mental health issue, then it doesn't exist. Naturally, Dr. F. never bothered to tell me what Mr. Schmo's diagnosis actually was when he passed along the forms along with a request for me to fill them out and submit them. Ascertaining a DSM-IV code became the topic of an increasingly panicked series of voicemail calls, which went something along these lines:
"Hi, Dr. F. It's Caroline. I need a DSM code to fill out Mr. Schmo's insurance forms, so if you could get that to me today, that would be great."
"Dr. F., it's Caroline. I'm waiting on that DSM code for Mr. Schmo. I can't submit the forms without it, so please let me know as soon as possible."
"It's Caroline. I really need the DSM code for Joe Schmo. I have three reimbursement forms to submit, and I'm still waiting."
Finally I decided, screw it. Providing me with something as mundane as the one piece of information I could not find myself clearly wasn't very high on Dr. F.'s list of priorities. So, using his other private clients as a guideline, I decided to code Mr. Schmo myself as having "anxiety disorder with mixed emotional features." After all, 90% of Dr. F.'s other private clients had the same diagnosis, and it seemed to be the upper-respiratory-virus of the mental health world: Something serious enough to require treatment, but conveniently vague enough to cover a wide range of conditions. Who doesn't have mixed emotions most of the time? And anyone alive and functioning in the modern world is anxious about something, or ought to be, anyway. I bet if you think about it, you're suffering from anxiety disorder with mixed emotional features right this very minute! So I duly filled out the forms and shipped them off to Blue Cross/Blue Shield posthaste. I left a message to that effect on Dr. F.'s voicemail and proceeded to forget about the matter....
...for the next TWO MONTHS, when Dr. F. finally got around to calling me back about my original message.
Dr. F.'s phone manner was, for want of a better term, inimitable. He talked with his mouth right next to the receiver, and he had a bad habit of clearing his throat in the middle of his sentences in a way that brought nothing to mind so much as a walrus in mid-Heimlich maneuver coughing up an unfortunate morsel of fish. The conversation proceeded something like this:
Dr. F.: "Caroline? HRACKCKCKCHRHRRHRRHRRMMMMCHCHCHCHCH. This is Dr. F. I'm calling about HRCKKCK Mr. Schmo's insurance forms."
Me (warily): "Yes?"
Dr. F.: "Yes, well. HRMHRHRHRMMRHHRHRHRM. You see, he doesn't have an anxiety disorder. ERRRHERRRHERRM. Actually, he's impotent."
Me (stunned): "Oh."
I assume there was more to our exchange than that, but my brain stopped processing right after it heard the word IMPOTENT. It was too busy thinking things like, "Did he just say - ?" and, "Did I just hear - ?" and, "Omigod omigod omigod omigod!!! Joe Schmo is IMPOTENT!!!"
Immediately I hung up the phone and ran downstairs to find Sarah (because I was so professional and ethical about confidentiality, as you can tell). "Sarah!" I hissed. "Guess what??? Joe Schmo? The guy with the midlife crisis car?? He's IMPOTENT!!!"
Sarah gasped in shock and clamped her hand over her mouth. We stared at each other for a long moment as the clock ticked noisily on the mantlepiece. Finally Sarah lowered her hand and said, in a strangled tone:
"I guess we know what she's crying about now."
We both promptly burst out in guffaws of laughter until we couldn't breathe.
P.S. In retrospect, this exchange never would take place in this day and age. Thanks to Pfizer and its little blue pills, Joe Schmo wouldn't need to buy a red sports car or seek out psychotherapy to overcome any inadequacies in the manhood department. Now that's one to tell the grandkids: "Back in my day, whippersnapper, you couldn't just take a pill for erectile dysfunction! You had to go to therapy! FREUDIAN therapy! And you did it and you liked it! Not like you kids today, with your Viagra and your Cialis!"
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