The Hatchling can read - kind of...

[Scene: sitting in the hospital cafe, the Hatchling points at a sign on the wall] 

Hatchling
Dada, look! "C", "O", "F", "F", "E", "E"! 

PTR
Good reading, sweetheart!  And what word do all those letters spell? 

Hatchling
Emergency? 

PTR
Close enough.

Et two sandwiches?

At another cafe near my house, the general air is that it's a hang-out for the retired and impaired.  There is nothing cool or stylish about it, but it's clean, new, and well-maintained with an atmosphere best described as "home-made v clinical".  But that's not why I go there.

I go there because I can get a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich and a coffee for $6.90.  I've been there 2 or 3 times per week in the last few months, just to sit down and read the paper and forget my woes.  The guy who runs it is a bit bumbling but nice, and eventually learned what my "regular" order was just in time for me to stop going there because I got a new job.

When it was time to leave I would sit there reading, covertly watching him out of the corner of my eye, until he was busy with another customer.  Then I would briskly get up and with a wave and shout of "See you later!", I would bolt for the door while avoiding eye contact.  Strange behaviour, I know, but if I didn't do this I would be trapped in a deadly escalation of farewells.

This is what would happen - every time I would say goodbye he would come back at me with another goodbye.  He would ALWAYS have the last word.  Which is fine - I can deal with that - but then he'd throw in another zinger to which I would have to respond.  He had an enormous arsenal of valedictory phrases to assault me with.  Example:

PTR

Thanks very much, bye!

Guy

You're welcome!

Have a great day!

PTR

Thanks, you too.

Guy

I will.

Thanks for coming.

PTR

Ha ha, no worries.

Guy

Yep, no worries.

Take it easy!

PTR

You too.

Guy

Too easy!

See you next time!

PTR

If we do meet again, we'll smile indeed;

If not, 'tis true this parting was well made

Guy

Why, then, lead on. O, that a man might know

The end of this day's business ere it come!

But it sufficeth that the day will end,

And then the end is known. Come, ho! away!

Exeunt.

I just have this nagging feeling that it's not going to end well...

Did you say "long black"?

There's a little coffee shop by a park near my house. They have a little chalkboard out by the road, with messages upon it to entice in the weary motorists.  It will usually say something like,

"Try Rhys's famous soup!"

or

"Fresh muffins!"

or

"Free wi-fi"

or

"Cool inside".

Recently I drove by and it said, (and I am not making this up, not even a little bit)

"Friday - my favourite F-word".

I really really wanted to go in and order a cup of my favourite C-word.  But I didn't because it's a nice little cafe that I like to take the Hatchling to and I didn't want to spoil it by acting all creepy.

Coffee tips

In a comment to my previous post, the boldly titled "Anonymous" questioned why I was calling a babycino a bubbacino.  Fair call.  To clarify, here are some similarly named coffee styles with explanatory notes.

Babycino: an espresso cup filled with frothed milk.

Bubbacino: an espresso cup filled with frothed milk served in a jail cell with a large, lonely, tattooed man.

Bobacino: an espresso cup filled with frothed milk served by a Mandalorian bounty hunter.

Babarcino: an espresso cup filled with frothed elephant milk.

Babayagacino: an espresso cup filled with frothed milk from a cannibalistic Russian witch.

Barbarinocino: an espresso cup filled with frothed milk served by a young John Travolta.

Bulbarcino: an espresso cup filled with frothed milk by a barista with a cranial nerve palsy.

Baabaacino: an espresso cup filled with frothed milk from a black sheep.

Not all of these are commonly available, at least not in Adelaide, but keep an eye out.  They're worth trying if you get the chance.

My bubba's too beveragalicious

PTR
Could I please have a cafe latte, a chai latte, a weak latte, and two bubbacinos?

Numbnut waiter
What's a bubbacino?

PTR
It's a little cup filled with milk froth.

Numbnut waiter
Oh, like a babycino?

And to save you the time making snide comments, I concede the following points:

1. Yes, bubbacinos are an absurdly yuppyish thing to order.  But at this place they were free, and I'd rather order a free bubbacino than have my $3.50 coffee sabotaged by a lunging Hatchling.
2. Yes, a weak latte is a girly thing to order.  Fortunately my Smaller Half is quite girly.
3. Yes, a chai latte is also an absurdly yuppyish thing to order.  But it was for a friend we were meeting hence I take no responsibility for her choice of beverages.

Now those issues are cleared up, let's focus on what a numbnut the waiter is.

Play it as it lies

The most useful thing I learned in my recent six week stint with the psychiatrists is that psychiatrists are doctors too.  Here's the evidence:

1. They know all about "Code Brown".
2. They get really annoyed at inappropriate referrals, such as the person with confusion due to an infection that the ED docs think is bonkers and should get detained and given anti-psychotic medication rather than something more appropriate such as, say, antibiotics.
3. Their handwriting is illegible.

With regard to point 3, although it's illegible, it does have the benefit of being voluminous.  They write so much that often you are able to get the general vibe of their notes even though the actual words are gibberish.

In contrast, the surgical team I've just joined, while they also have unintelligible writing, don't seem to be able to use sentences in their notes.  To be fair, this is probably because they are scribbling madly, desperately trying to catch up with the surgeon, who conducts the round so fast that windows are shattered by the sonic boom.

It's pretty intimidating getting thrown into the midst of this as a student because it means that anything in the notes is thruply confusing.  Not only is the handwriting terrible, the actual text is just bizarre abbreviations of things that you wouldn't understand even if it was actually written out in full.  On the round this doesn't matter so much because as a student my main tasks seem to be to hold the tongue depressors in case anybody wants to do some Playschool craft projects and to not get trampled underfoot by the aforementioned rampaging surgeon.

Clinics though - clinics are a different story.  Today I was given the job of taking notes, which is fine (in fact, the surgeon told me I was a "born note taker", which may actually be an insult, but anyway) except it means that I'm holding the notes and hence also have the job of flipping around in the previous notes and trying to answer questions about the previous appointments.

The surgeon would turn to me and ask something like, "What was the original plan when Mr Smith first presented last year?".  I'd find the page and see that it would seem to say something like, "P) OPO f/u A/S2 w C+R".  Now if you're roolly smart like me you can mentally adjust for the scrawlings and say, "Outpatient followup up in 1 month with a chest x-ray".  Which is fine. 

But the next line says, "2. FFfFt + ananas - ref/ chok", and what do you do with that?

I can't figure out what it means, nor even what it might mean.  The nihilistic part of me wants to throw caution to the wind by saying, "Klaatu barada nikto", just to see what happens.  However, that is not how you establish credibility on day 2 of a new clinical placement.  It's more suitable for a morning tea in week 5 when everyone already knows you're a bit of a nut.  So I simply say, "It looks like the plan was for fffffft, ananas and ref chok."

The surgeon pauses and stares at me long enough for my heart to skip two beats.  "Hmm, fair enough.  It wouldn't be my approach but I'm pretty conservative", he says, and carries on.

Clouds in my coffee

In the middle of my day I found myself lost in a bureaucratic meeting.  People were talking words that I knew but their meaning was obscure to me.  There was discussion of leveraging client actualities, of service overlap, and of negative expression of emotion prior to an upcoming facility transfer.

So I wrote some poems in the haiku style instead.

There's a cardboard box in our doctors' office that has the coffee supplies in it.  On the sides are written poems in the haiku style about or inspired by coffee.  Coffee haikus - I hear you think - what a bunch of hipsters. And truly, there is no defence against such an accusation.  The ones I wrote are pretty damn good though...

A warm cup to hold
To take the place of a hand.
Welcome to the tribe.

Black? White? Some sugar?
Do you embrace or mask the
Bitterness of life?

Smaggie

My Smaller Half and I became bogans yesterday for the day.  It was a bit like that Bowie song, We can be heroes, except boganish because we ate at Ikea.

We took the Hatchling along for a shopping trip because my Smaller Half wanted to suss out ... something ... I can't remember what it was any more, because we emerged blinking into the sunlight 3 hours later with some picture frames, a hanging photo thing that looks like a roll of film, and some fabric.  I almost bought some fake bamboo plants but it was wrestled out of my hands by my Smaller Half who failed to appreciate my primal urge to cannibalize Ikea products to make wargames terrain.  Tragic.

Anyway, after we'd been careening around for a while looking at Molger, Stokki, Ribbi, Svalbo and the other Swedish dwarves, the Hatchling decided that she really needed to be fed RIGHT NOW so we plonked ourselves down in the cafe and plugged her in.  Then I discovered that Ikea sells bottomless cups of coffee for a buck ninety five.  Even the worst coffee in the world is a bargain at that price.  (Side node: why is it called "bottomless"?  It's a very poor analogy indeed. A bottomless cup would be absolutely useless and you'd get nothing to drink at all.)  So I filled up on cheap coffee which was actually about 3 stars out of 5, so not the worst coffee I've had recently.

Oh, and the reason I've been banging on about Ikea at all is that the checkout chick's name tag said "Smaggie".  I asked her if her name was really Smaggie, and she said that it was a nickname because her real name was very long.  I said that Smaggie sounded just like an Ikea product and I'd thought that maybe the staff all Ikea-ize their names.  Smaggie just gave me a funny look.  I thought it was a fair question though.

Fathers Day - whither the apostrophe?

Despite the fact that I have no children, my Smaller Half took me down to our favourite cafe today and bought me coffee and scones.  Lovely!  It was really crowded when we got there though so I was worried we might be turned away. 

But lo and behold, knowing the staff really helps.  They directed us to our favourite table by the fire.  There was even a sign on it saying, "Reserved", so I knew that it was being saved for me.  After all, I can be outgoing when the mood strikes me, but on the whole I am more introverted than not.

Sitting sipping our coffee and nibbling on our scones made me wonder - where does the apostrophe belong in the phraselet "Father's Day"?  Is it the day of the father - Father's Day?  Or is it the day of all fathers - Fathers' Day?  I lean towards the latter even though the spirit of the day is more the former.

I hope you've all had a good Fathers' Day.  If you're lucky enough to still have a father around, make sure you tell him how important he is to you.