This was going well until I learned I would be responsible for setting up the lab accounts. And setting up the lab accounts on that first day, I learned I had access to very little information to make this work. It turns out this isn’t a standard product in the healthcare world. You’re supposed to be able to pick this up as your first day on the job, but at my place you go from no technical background to having to learn the lab stuff. And oh boy, did we have to learn it. I had to get on a conference call and learn how the lab works. What it can do and can’t do. How to get a report printed or what kind of reports to look for and when and why. I got on a conference call. So I got this thing called Lab Access – which is this electronic medical record where you go and you enter data. There are a variety of different information fields on there to store all your lab information. Like, you enter your name, and who your physician is, and what the labs are that are part of the order, and what they’re for, and all this other information. I got on a conference call with this guy who runs this. I forget his name. He was so nice. “I would never ever tell you to do anything in Lab Access.” He said, “I’m not telling you anything. I’m not telling you what to do.” What he was saying is, “If I’m using Lab Access, every day there are certain things I have to enter in the lab information. You have to go into this office and it takes your key card and you key in this information about where you are today, how many calories you’re burning today, how many calories you want to burn today, and how fast you want to burn that, and it inputs all the data into your electronic medical record so that it’s all in there for us to use. And we’re like, ‘Well you know, I’m not supposed to do that. I shouldn’t enter any of that stuff.’ But as long as I’m doing what you told me to do, then you can’t tell me anything, because I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m doing everything exactly the way you told me to do it.” It felt very strange being on a conference call, having one person – me – and the boss – who has no lab experience whatsoever. And this guy is talking to me about Lab Access and he’s telling me I can’t let anybody else touch this thing. If there’s a training issue, I have to go up there and touch it myself. If it breaks down and needs a new drive, it’s my responsibility to fix it, or there’s no one to fix it. After having no technology experience at all, I’m suddenly in this role where I have to do all these things because I’m in a position where people are counting on me to do these things right. What I think the problem is here is that we’ve bought into the marketing that we’re supposed to be so much more productive if we have technology. We believe that technology is going to be better. If we don’t have technology, we can’t do our job. It’s easier for us to buy into that, the mythology around this. Why do you need technology? Because it’s going to make your life so much easier. That if I don’t have this, I can’t do my job. And if I don’t have this, then that’s my problem. I just think that it’s so ironic that in a time when we’re supposed to be really embracing technology, it has really turned into a barrier to people having job satisfaction. We’ve got to try and push back against it a little bit. I worked in software for a little while, so I’m pretty good with computers. I started out as a writer, so I have that familiarity with technology. But I did all kinds of odd jobs. Some days you can do whatever you want. One day I had to build shelves in this office I was in, and all I had was an electric screwdriver. We had to do this thing where we had to paint numbers onto each of the shelves and some of the shelves were made of plastic and some were made of metal. And I couldn’t see a pattern to this at all. So I painted, and I painted some, and then I’m like, “What happened to the first three? What happened to the second one? What’s going on? What are these numbers for?” The boss is standing over my shoulder, laughing at me because I’m like, “I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do.” Eventually it started making sense to me. But until that point, I was just trying to work and I was having a really hard time. It was really hard for me to get into the mindset of my job and it wasn’t even about my job, it was about the tools I had. I was just so inexperienced with computers and I was looking at a screen all day, and I kept having this strange feeling of trying to write and get something on the screen, and having to deal with this keyboard because the screen wasn’t doing what it was supposed to be doing. I’d had problems with tech support. I had a computer that kept crashing at my desk at work. The screen would freeze up and the mouse would freeze up, and it would just completely lock up. So I brought it down to the office, where I knew the tech support guy would be able to figure out how to fix it because they had all the tools and the fancy-ass stuff. The first day I brought it down to tech support, this woman who worked there was not helpful. She was nice, but she wasn’t very helpful. I was like, “No, this isn’t working, I need this fixed. I need to know what’s wrong.” After a few weeks of that, it became really apparent that this was just not the right job for me, to be working in a department where I wasn’t really getting any support. And that’s how it should be. I worked in several different companies. Every single one of them had a point where they tried to use technology to push people out. And this started in the IT department. Every place I worked at, the IT department – they were the ones who built the new systems, and they were the ones who set them up, and they were the ones who set up the computers. They were the ones who taught everybody else in the organization how to use technology and were the experts. And if you did something wrong, they would blame it on you. It got to the point where people would be freaking out about having to do these IT procedures – which is ridiculous. You can get those done at home – nobody has to do it. So then, there was another point where this woman who worked in the IT department – we were starting to change over to a new system, and the new system had this whole new system of technology set up that she had to learn to manage. And she was like, “But I don’t know how to manage this new system.” And the IT department guy who came out to our department and ran this training, he went through and he said, “No, I don’t think you need to learn this system. There’s no reason for you to learn this system. We don’t have anybody who’s going to ask you to do things with this new system. You’re not going to have to know how to do this. You can still have your job just as it is now.” That was fine, but I was like, “I’m not going to have any information.” I can’t really know about this new system that I have to use because I don’t have the right training or knowledge on this thing. So the training became an issue. One day, I’m in the training and this guy is talking about learning about this new technology system and I look over and I can see the girl who did the training, and she had a little smile on her face, and she’s leaning back and taking a sip of water. And I think, “This isn’t right. This guy’s telling us we need to learn this technology system and she’s not even going to do the training.” And then