The Gum Tree for 2004 September 24

After a couple of days of a sniffling nose and a head cold, and now I think that I am better. Two stories of note. 1) LIFE IN THE ER! Well, wednesday was the first of many exciting times at the ER. You really meet some interesting people. I arrieved right in the middle of a huge emergency. A patient came in who had severe chest pains and who said that he just took a pill an hour before (mabey he took Frances' drug cocktail). Shortly after coming in, he started having severe bleeding, and had to be taken to the OR room and endoscopy to see what was going on in there. It just so happened that he somehow opened up a hole in his esophagos as well as his Aorta about 7 mm wide, and he was bleeding all over the place. The hospital gave him 50 UNITS of blood which is roughly equivalent to 25 liters. I know what you are asking me... "so Joe if the human body can only hold 5 liters of blood where did all the other blood go to?" You guessed it!,--- on the floor for the poor sanitary workers to clean up. The blood was just pumped right in and then right out again. He also received 20 units of plasma. Well, I was in and out with the records and biohazard bins. My first sight of him was in the dark OR lieing with his head toward me and with blood soaking his sheets and gurney. If he would have been just minutes late to the ER, he would not be around to tell the story of how his life was spared. As far as I know he is doing OK. It was good to be there in the ER. The later it got, the stranger the visitor to the ER, but in the afternoon/evening I guess that you get a fairly good cross section of society. 2) Wells Fargo "the money tree" We go to Wells Fargo sometimes to use it's ATM for Louise's Aussie Banking. They have free withdrawals. Well, as I drove up to that ATM I noticed that there was a large sum of cash sitting in the cash slot that was from the Blue Jetta that was in front of me. I removed it and proceeded to make a withdrawal. The machine spit out my card and as I was waiting I was thinking, "is this thing going to give me my money?" It took about 2 minutes after I had tried to reinsert my card that my money came out. I took it to the Tellers inside, and they thanked me. I asked if they could get a record of the person who withdrew that money, (surely I thought that they could), and they said that if somebody comes in they have the day, time and discription of the car. I went back to the ATM (it being on the way out of the parking lot) and lo and behold there was some cash sticking out of the ATM from another person who happened to have been bamboozeled by the same machine. All in all I took $240.00 back to the tellers. I got much the same response "if they come in we will know who's money this is," but what if they call in a month and try to dispute their statement that says that they were deducted $200 for no reason. I can just imagine them saying "sorry those are the records that we have" not "We are incompetent and our ATM is defective but we will not place it out of order because it is not our problem". One of the tellers even said in a nonchalant way "oh, it's just spitting out cash". Great... get me signed up with this bank right away!!!! That is compounded with my own bad experience with THAT BANK and how they added unneccesary charges to my account and held half of every paycheck that I deposited for three days. That is my rant for the month. Boy, I wish that I could exact some altruistic punishment sometimes, but vigillante style justice often comes only in the absence of the rule of law. I am sure that they will have their just reward sooner or later. All in all I am doing well and life is good to Louise and I.