As I was thinking about my post for today, I suddenly
realized it has been 22 years since I have worked in an office outside of my
home. I guess my worries about not being
disciplined enough to stick with meeting deadlines, keeping my references
up-to-date, taking on new clients, or even taking my career in new directions turned
out to be unfounded, because all these years later, I still seem to be doing
okay.
It was on December 13, 1991, that I landed my very first
client and began my own local service.
Now you might wonder how I remember all of these dates. Believe me, my memory is not that good, as
much as I would love it to be. What I
have done over the years is keep a journal of my career. It is very easy to do and can give you a
sense of where your career goes as you move through the years and lines and
lines and lines of production. I have a day planner, a hard copy planner
purchased at OfficeMax, where I like to jot down notes for ideas for articles, handouts
for my students, phone numbers, favorite web sites, and my list goes on and on.
One section is devoted to my career journal, and all I do is mark down the date
and place of work, when I change jobs, a new client, my AHDI activities, and I
even include when I would get a call for a potential client, even if it
resulted in not getting the account.
Anything I feel is significant relating to my career, I jot it down. Whenever I have any doubts about my abilities,
my skill set, my confidence in general (and we all have days like that when you
think—what am I doing here?!!), I get out my list of accomplishments and
activities, and that snaps me back to reality pretty quickly.
My first client turned out to be one of my busiest. It even involved working weekends, because
what I picked up on Friday night, I had to return on Monday morning. So my Saturday mornings were spent at my
desk. You may find this hard to believe,
but this physician could see up to 100 patients in a day, and he dictated on
every single one of them. That was
usually about 2 days a week when he would be seeing only postop patients and
checking their incisions. He did a lot
of endoscopic carpal tunnel surgery. He
eventually added an associate to his practice, which made this account almost a
2-person operation, but I managed to keep it up pretty well. Because I gave them such excellent service
and turn-around, if I did have to have an occasional day off or just had to
delay return of his work, they were fine with that.
I will never forget the one night when the doc was dictating
his chart notes after office hours, and in the background, he was playing a
video of himself lecturing on carpal tunnel surgery. He played it so loud, that his dictation
sounded like an echo, only the echo was saying something completely
different. Talk about a challenge! I
told him the next day I was going to charge him double for that day’s work.
When I told him why, he just laughed and walked down the hall. I did not charge him double, but he never did
that again. I think he appreciated that
I did not go wild MT on him and just expressed my somewhat displeasure at the
difficulty of transcribing 2 very loud voices speaking at the same time, but I
kept it professional and friendly and even joking a bit about it. I believe it is true if you treat people the
way you want to be treated, most of the time, they will return that back to you
in kind. It has worked well for me more
often than not.
Throughout 1992 I picked up p.r.n. accounts. One was a hospital about 45 minutes from my
home and the rest were handling backup for MT friends with their own
services. We would help each other out
during vacations or any time someone needed to be away. The hard part about p.r.n. accounts is you
can have days where they all need you on the same day. I did have a handful of days where I started
around 9 a.m. and finished up at midnight.
Thankfully, there were not too many of those days. It may be good for the bank account, but not
so good on the mind and body. In
February of 1993, I did get another permanent account for a small family
practice group, so between my 2 regular clients and my p.r.n. clients, I had a
very busy service and felt very proud of what I created and ran right up until
a few months before my move to Idaho. My husband, Joe, accepted a job in February of
1994 with a large ENT practice in Idaho, began his job in June, and I stayed
behind to handle selling our home. I
wound up selling our house twice, which also resulted in my closing down my
service a bit prematurely because obviously at the time, I had no idea I would
have to go through selling my house a second time.
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