How To Disappear Completely

If You Are Ever A Parent

If you are ever a parent, please do not have small kids.
If you are ever a parent with small kids, please do not take them to medical appointments.
If you are ever a parent with small kids and you have taken them to medical appointments, please be sure they are well-behaved and occupied while you attend your medical appointment.
If you are ever a parent with small kids that are with you at the medical appointment you should have avoided taking them to and they have nothing to do during said appointment, please do not expect the receptionist to babysit them.

The receptionist requires ample time in order to take patients back to rooms, change out old rooms, find more patients to fill last-minute cancellations, find therapists to inform them that patients have been roomed, run the laundry, fold the laundry, answer the phone, give receipts to patients on the self-pay plan, photocopy insurance cards, and confirm and schedule appointments, all for three PTs.

She does not need to be chasing children down back passages and pulling them out of laundry rooms and off PT equipment before they kill themselves. Nor does she need to hear them screaming bloody murder in the back rooms, even if she is eternally grateful she is not the physical therapist who must figure out how to work on a patient whose decibel-maxing child is crawling all over it.

It's been a long day at the office.

My dad jokingly asked if I think receptionisting is not my calling.*

Not receptionisting per se. Just children.

Well, all right, so I still like children anyway. But I think I take after my dad. He wore earplugs until we were five. But he turned out okay.

*A little note on calling. To people who say "Such-and-such is not my calling," I ask, "Are you doing it right now?"
"Well, yes."
"Then it's your calling. Whatever you are doing at the moment, that's your calling. And you are called to do it for God's glory."
"But I'm flipping hamburgers. Surely this can't be my calling."
"If you mean 'surely this can't be what I am going to do for the rest of my life,' then you are probably right. But I don't care if it's changing diapers or cleaning toilets. For the five minutes you do those things, that's God's calling for those five minutes of your existance. And that's about as certain as we can be of God's calling for our life: if you are doing it right now, then it's God's calling for your Right Now. Don't ask me what God's calling is for your Tomorrow or your Next Year. We can guess at that, and sometimes we are even right in our guessing. But I am dead certain about the Right Now. And if you can't do what's in front of your nose well, then you can't do anything well at all. So stopping looking under other people's noses."

It's a philosophy my dad passed on to his children. A philosophy concretized by example.