Going to the doctor after your 30th; A Guideline.

Going to the doctor sucks, no matter how old you are. But it seems to get exponentially worse the older you get. I’ve decided to go through and write down a few rules of thumb for people like me who have to go to the doctor.

You’re not going to have any idea who or where or how the whole proof of insurance thing works:

If you are like me, you get more and more medical insurance cards then you could ever know what to do with in the mail. So I put them all in my wallet. Then eventually when I go to the doctor, I am stuck sorting through dozens of insurance cards, some from previous jobs, some from different states, and some from companies that don’t even exist anymore. Generally, the woman working at the desk asking for this information had used up her last bit of patience about 42 years ago and has absolutely no time for you to sort this out. So she will generally, badger you with stupid questions and suggestions and critique your handling of your wallet items. “Can’t you just call, like an HR person from work and ask them?” “Why you have so many cards in your wallet?” “Someone needs to get organized!!” “You have a George Costanza Wallet!”

Leave your pride at the door:

If you’re like me and have for the most part not worked out since the onset of adulthood, the doctor is going to call you fat. He/She isn’t going to call you fat once or twice, but over and over again throughout the entire time you are talking to them. Just when you think you have moved on to talking about something else, they will circle back and call you fat again. One way or another, you’re going to walk out of that building feeling like the fattest thing that ever managed to crawl out of the ocean and grow legs.

Be prepared to be absolutely terrified:

The doctor is going to say things that to me sound like “You’re going to have a heart attack you fat shit!” One must be prepared to hear things like this; otherwise they come as quite a shock. They will also leaf through your family and personal medical history and determine that you will get diabetes if you ever eat anything again. Then, now that they’ve really got you all pissed off and fired up, they will take your blood pressure and wonder why it is so high. This generally leads to them calling you a fat bastard a half dozen more times.

Get ready to be fondled!

It’s not every day you get groped and fondled and if you do, you should probably do some serious re-evaluation of your life choices. I remember when I was young; a physical was a quick turn of the head and a cough. Now that I am 31 I expected a god damn cigarette when he was done. I don’t even know what he was looking for, he didn’t tell me anything. He just stared at it like it was going to tell him the meaning of life. And then when he was done, he just said “okay”, and started calling me fat again.

Prepare to have your doctor jump to all sorts of conclusions about things:

One thing I have noticed is that once a doctor hones into one medical concern they have for you (in my case “FAT”), they tend to use that to explain every ailment that comes out of your mouth. “Doc, my ankle hurts sometimes”, well you’re fat. “Doc, my energy levels suck”, yeah you and all the other fat people. “Doc, my fucking head is falling off”, probably because it weighs so much, the rest of your fat body is rejecting it.

The doctor is also going to do everything he/she can to stick you with a Flu Shot:

They must get some kind of commission on how many flu shots they give out because I felt like he was selling me a car. I had to tell him 10 times that I didn’t want any sort of medications that I didn’t absolutely need. But he just kept pressing me on it. Like, what is this the 13th century? If I get the flu, I get the flu. Are you expecting some sort of Bubonic Plague this winter or something? “Well you should get a flu shot; we are recommending it to everyone this year, not just elderly anymore”. Well I don’t want one pal, I don’t care if you’re recommending them to people, how is that a rationale? If you were “recommending” colonoscopies this winter, guess what? I wouldn’t want that either.

You’re going to have to answer all sorts of personal questions:

Are you sexually active? How many times a day would you say, you eat? How much water are you drinking? Are you defecating regularly? Any blood in your stool or urine? Like, Jesus Christ man, if there was blood, I probably would have led this discussion with that little tidbit. I wouldn’t just sit here and wait for you to ask me something like that. “Boy, I sure hope he asks me about the blood in my piss that seems like something that could be a huge problem. “

You also aren’t prepared to answer most of these questions. It’s not every day someone asks you how many glasses of water you drink in a day. Sometimes none, sometimes five... I suppose it all depends on if I have Gatorade available and how hung over I am.

Be prepared to not have your doctor care when you have done something he told you too:

The last time I saw this guy, I was a pack a day smoker. Now I haven’t smoked in 10 months. And I told him this and he said “okay, well that’s a start, how about exercise and diet, you fat pile of pig shit?” At least that’s what I heard. Also the last time, he saw me, my blood pressure was HIGH, like borderline hypertension high. Now it is on the high side of normal and he still wants more.

Then the entire time you are there, you have to sit and talk to a well dressed person, with all sorts of fancy equipment on, wearing a shirt and tie and nice dress pants, while you’re sitting there in a 75 cent, tie behind, crazy person, skirt thing, with your balls hanging out. I never understood that. Can’t we take care of the naked stuff first and then I get dressed and then we have our little conversation about health? Why do I have to remain basically nude the entire time? Are you trying to see how blue my legs can get in your 55 degree room I am sitting in, maybe how stuck the fish paper can get to my ass while I sit on it for 45 minutes answering your questions. Why doesn’t that make you uncomfortable? I certainly would have a very hard time playing Q&A with a stranger if his naked member was 18 inches from my chest.

You will witness the whole doctor/Nurse dynamic at work:

Is there really any clearer example of superiority in the work place then this? “I’m going to leave the room and be back in five minutes, but Heather is going to come in and take your blood pressure and test your oxygen levels”. Well why can’t you just do it? Where the hell are you going? What do you have to get back to Angry Birds? Is it really that below the good doctor to just take peoples blood pressure, why the game of musical doors? How many people need to get paid on account of my visit? Is there any way we can avoid having a woman come in here and seeing me in this see-thru, crotch less, backless, ass less, tie-behind? Oh but the doctor will manage to show back up just in time to check out your testicles. For some reason, they always manage to make time for that.

I can’t imagine how horrible it must be to be even older as your body really starts to wear down and deal with these people on a much more regular basis. At least I have time to reverse my ways and hopefully avoid having to endure more prolonged doctor’s visits. I guess it could be worse, especially since the alternative is death.

At what point am I supposed to start caring about the NBA lockout?

I ask this question in all seriousness. When are we supposed to care? Baseball runs into Football, which overlaps with Hockey, which runs into baseball, anyone have any problems with that? The NBA, at one point was just an added bonus in between the other, superior sports that we all know and love.
The NFL recently ended a lockout in time to start their regular season without having missed much, maybe a few OTA’s but who cares. For me, the NFL lockout was turning into a bit of a concern. I look forward to Fantasy Football and the whole Sunday football/food/good company tradition. So what would I have done without that for a year? Obviously I would have survived, but I probably would have enjoyed myself a little less.

If Football had stayed locked out, we would still have had baseball until October and then gone right into Hockey once it ended. This still would have been a tremendous transition but having a couple of months of Browns/Pats football and Bruins Hockey is quite a treat. Pile this on top of the fun of playing in multiple fantasy football leagues and all the fun that brings to your life, especially late in the season.

Then out here in Boston we have the Stanley Cup winning Bruins coming back which to me is by far the second most entertaining sport to watch behind football.

So, do you see my point? Where in all of this am I supposed to give a shit about the NBA not playing basketball?

Does anyone care, outside of people who work directly for the NBA in some capacity? Who needs professional basketball?

The NBA is by far the worst in my opinion in the below categories which I have made up and are loosely based on factual information.

• Competitive Balance: Only 9 NBA Franchises have won NBA championships in the last 31 years. (This is completely true). This makes the NBA very unappealing to the other 23 cities, who have either never seen a championship or have not seen one since before Drew Barrymore was feeding Reese’s Piece’s to ET.

• Media/Marketing Biases: For whatever reason, the television and marketing moguls seem to be attracted to NBA Basketball players to a point where they will sell their own farms for the sake of making people like them. More so then any of the other, better sports. Personally, I think this started with Jordan and Nike and eventually worked its way through every shoe company/sports media outlet etc. Everyone wants the next Jordan, and I’m not talking about on the court. I am talking about his next pair of shoes. Mind you he has been retired for a decade but you can’t get to Footlocker fast enough, every year, when his shoes come out. So the gravy train gets rolling, and inevitably the shoe companies want to find the next guy, enter Lebron James, or Dwayne Wade or Carmelo Anthony. Are any of these shitheads Michael Jordan? Absolutely not, not even close! But it is in the shoe companies best interest to make people think they are, so they open their wallets and pay EVERYONE in the media to talk nice about them, and pamper them, until eventually ESPN is writing blogs calling Lebron James BETTER then Michael Jordan, (mission accomplished Nike). Why this is so obvious in the NBA and not MLB or the NFL is beyond me.

• Excessive Celebration: Unfortunately I have to hand this award to the National Basketball Association as well. Now hold on when I say this, it may come as a shock to many avid NBA fans, but basketball is not that fucking hard. Basketball is not that hard for me, and I’m white and short and fat. I can’t even imagine how NOT HARD it is when you are 6’10 and an athlete and have a 4 ft vertical. At that point, you are looking down at the basket when you jump. Yet, nearly every time one of these jackaloons makes a layup, they high five and hit themselves in the chest with their fists and yell shit into the crowd as though they have actually accomplished something remotely difficult. It would be like me going out and getting the mail and after I brought it upstairs, began yelling about how awesome I was for doing it, while hitting myself in the face with my own penis. This entire situation is helped along by play by play announcers such as Marv Albert’s who still believe a reverse layup is a difficult thing to do and can’t keep their hands out of each other’s pants whenever someone makes a super difficult three point jump shot, even though any one armed blind guy could probably make one out five of them.

• Overall terrible player behavior: I don’t understand how NBA players are constantly getting themselves into trouble. First off, how dumb do you have to be, to be an NBA basketball player and commit a crime? At one point, I think the entire Portland Trailblazers starting lineup was in prison. Like anyone would have a hard time picking you out of a lineup. I think most people are going to remember getting robbed by a 7’4, 185 pound freak of a human being. How do you ever expect to get away with anything? That’s like getting robbed by Mothra. The NBA also has an extraordinarily loose drug policy. By far the loosest in all of professional sports. This is probably for good reason as I don’t think there would be much of an NBA left once people started asking for piss tests.

• The dumbest pay system in the history of organized sport: You know how much money Greg Oden has made through his first four NBA Seasons? 20 million dollars! You know how many games he has played in those four seasons? 82! I have played in more beer league softball games over the last four years then Greg Oden has NBA basketball games. This wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem if the NBA worked their player contracts the way that everyone else in the world does. You see, in the NFL or NHL and even MLB, you have to play to make most of your money as your contract is based on incentives. In the NBA, you just have to be not dead.

• The most painful live sports experience: Anyone been to an NBA game recently? It’s like having a seizure for three hours. It is very difficult to tell where and when the actual basketball game is going on amid the dancing strippers and midgets on stilts, indoor pyrotechnics, shit falling from the ceiling on parachutes, people firing tee-shirts and other random crap at you with slingshots, the never-ending, organ music and 1990’s hip hop sound effects. All other sports have these fringe entertainment factors at work however the sport itself takes precedence over the sideshows. In the NBA, I’m not so sure.

• The Goddamn NBA starting lineups: In other sports, the starting lineups are either a blurb in your program or a basically nonexistent exercise for the public announcer. But in the fucking NBA, it has to be some sort of a spectacle. And this spectacle repeats itself every single game. Why? Everyone knows who starts for their team, why do we have to go through this self indulged, professional wrestler style, entrance prior to playing basketball? If anything, this entrance looks even sillier once they start playing basketball after it ends. It would be like having Sean Michael’s WWF entrance, but then Sean Michael’s started playing badminton once the entrance ends.

• The only sport where college is better than the pro’s: NCAA football is great but any team would get waxed by any NFL team. NCAA Baseball is barely even a sport. But then there is the relationship between NCAA Basketball and the NBA. I think Duke or Carolina could give the Minnesota Timberwolves a run for their money. I think college players still play basketball better than their professional counterparts which is something you can’t say about any other sport. I know for a fact that they play better defense in college, you certainly can’t say that about any other sport. So basically the NBA is the only sport where you actually have to get worse at the sport before going pro.

So when do I start missing this shit? Why would I? To me the NBA trying to compete with the NFL and MLB and NHL is like the animated TV series, American Dad. It would probably be okay on its own but unfortunately, it is on after Family Guy, The Cleveland Show and The Simpsons, so good luck with that. The NBA Players Association, in my opinion, has made a huge mistake with this current lockout. They already had a league where they could basically do whatever in the hell they wanted, virtually no salary caps and they didn’t even have to play basketball in order to make money. Why would they ever upset that status quo? They were taking a free limo ride down easy street. Now they have opened this huge can of worms. You can’t improve upon a perfect situation NBA players, perfection can only go backwards and make things worse.

The Manager

Are managers at work necessary? In a sense, yes and in another sense, I am not so sure. Obviously the board members and executives need people on the front lines to organize and execute their vision of however they think the company should operate, but past that, are they really all that necessary?


Here is my idea of what an ideal manager does. He/She attends meetings with the board and executives and figures out what direction they want to take the company and how their direct reports can help this process. He/She also figures out what work their direct reports need to do in order to make this happen. He/She assigns the work to the direct reports and that’s it. End of discussion. Just tell people what you want them to do, by when you want it done and leave them alone.

Think about this in it's purest sense, do we all NEED to be MANAGED?  Are we all that disorganized and listless, like a bunch of leaves fluttering in the wind without some person reigning us all in and keeping us on the right track, like a bunch of dumb horses that would just wonder off into the woods without someone managing us? 

Most of the time, unless you are operating some sort of a sweatshop, you’re dealing with adults. In many cases, college educated adults who all have bills to pay. So there is really no need to have someone standing over their shoulders making sure their assignments are getting done as though they are children who don’t want to do their math homework. Everyone knows that if you don’t get things done on time, on a consistent basis, you eventually get fired. Therefore, you can’t pay bills, and eventually you end up living under a bridge someplace with a bunch of other clowns who couldn’t get their jobs done properly. So that eliminates the need of management to constantly be up peoples asses about things they need to have done and when.

Then there is the whole idea of the employees needing someone to talk to about vacation time and benefits and problems at work etc. These were important aspects of management prior to the invention of the internet. Every single piece of clerical crap like this can now be easily handled within your typical online, employee documentation portal. And if things get so bad at work that employees have to voice their opinion to someone, there is always HR.

Now, employees need to have their performance reviewed once per year. This can still be done by the manager who assigns the work to them. Whoever gets the most work done, in an acceptable way, on time, gets the bigger raises. This keeps things simple. Since the personal relationship between the employee and the manager would be minimal at best, there isn’t much room for someone rubbing the manager the wrong way, or sleeping with him/her for a raise, or ass kissing or taking credit for other peoples work. This system is based off of simple math and should work for everyone. It is much more difficult to argue with the results of a review when it is based on hard mathematical performance figures. You either got all your work done on time or you didn’t.

Then there is the idea that managers must be there to motivate the help. Motivation is something that is extraordinarily overrated in our time. I have said this before, and I will say it again, nobody likes working for a “company” unless they have some sort of major, personal financial interest in whatever the company is doing. Over people’s lifetimes, they get better and better and pretending to be motivated to be there but that is all it is, people pretending to care. So enough with this “motivation” guff, just judge people based off of the work they get done and let’s stop diluting ourselves. Stop expecting people in their 30’s, whom you pay just barely enough money to get by on a monthly basis to have a deep seeded love affair with whatever sort of widget you are selling, it is a complete waste of time and money. Judge people on production, not attitude. Unless they are a complete basket case and making other employees uncomfortable, who cares? People work to make money for themselves and their families, not because they love some company.

Managers are often very concerned with people coming in on time. I firmly believe we are at a point with our technology where employees will eventually not ever have to all drive to a common building with the companies name on it. Just about everyone who works for a company already has the ability to work from home. It is better for the employees pocket book, the environment and morale overall. Even so, within my system, if an employee is consistently late and they still get their allotted work done, who cares? You hire people that you think will get some kind of work done, if it takes them 6 hours a day to do it, mission accomplished.

And then there are meetings. Managers love meetings. Here is my policy about meetings. Unless someone can prove that whatever change they want to hold a meeting about will net the company a gain in their quarterly revenue from the previous year, there is no meeting.

Managers have also grown very fond of the team building idea within a company. Everyone has to be a part of team as though we are all playing basketball. Again, very overrated, anyone who has ever worked on a corporate team understands that most of the time the members of the team have absolutely nothing to do with one another. I once worked on a Retail Loss Prevention team for two years and all I did was write Korn Shell Scripts for data automation purposes. Yet, I still had to attend meetings about employees stealing shit from stores and report to a manager who didn’t know how to turn his monitor off and on. Corporate “teams” are nothing more than groups of people who share a similar salary range on some organizational chart, nothing more.

There is the coaching and mentoring aspect of management that I also find to be extraordinarily overrated. Since I have started my professional career in IT, I have worked directly for at least 30 separate managers. Out of those thirty people, I only learned skills that I use today (rather successfully) from two of them. I learned customer service skills within the IT business that I utilize today from a guy I worked for indirectly in a helpdesk when I was 18 (TButt). Within the same company, I eventually wound up working for a guy who taught me my management strategy and honed my troubleshooting and systems software management skills as well as organization skills that I still use (Doug). And that’s it. Other than those two dudes, I would like to thank Matt Coan for everything I have today.

I have worked for other people who I enjoyed working with and I currently have no issues with those whom I work for but in the past, I am surprised some of the people who called themselves my managers could actually hit water when they pissed. I have worked for people who were arrested for embezzlement, fired for sexual harassment, literally lied their ways into jobs which they were eventually fired from, hired people just because they were hot, used drugs in company bathrooms, sold company assets on EBay, came to work drunk, watched porn at work and one guy even got fired for calling a Hispanic person something that you never call a Hispanic person.

The fact of the matter is, managers aren’t what they used to be in the 50s and 60s and 70s and even the 80s. Much of what they were relied upon to do can be replaced by a few lines of HTML. People need their jobs much more now than ever, so everyone gets how important it is to get things done well and on time. People don’t become managers anymore for being great leaders, they become managers because they were already a manager somewhere else or because they have been working somewhere for so long that they were going to quit, so someone made them a manager. People want to be managers because it looks nice on a resume, but do we need them? Do we need all of them? Are companies making more money than they could be if they diluted half their salaries to the people who actually do the work?