So once upon a time, back when I was working as a receptionist in a doctor’s office and really bitter about the whole thing, I was asked to return a call from a patient and give them some bad news from their doctor. Not bad news like, “You’re going to die next week,” but like “Since you’ve not followed up as instructed, the doctor will no longer be writing prescriptions for your medications.”
No lie – at the time, I was ticked off. I’d already spoken to the individual before, and I knew what their response would be. I was not in the mood to face that kind of anger at the moment. So, as one does when they feel the world is dumb, I went to Facebook. I said something like “Success is being able to take responsibility for your own actions. Failure is having to apologize for someone else.”
Yeah, at the time, I thought that sounded pretty smart. After all, I was, like, twenty-five. I knew what was up. To me, the idea of success was totally tied in to how many messes you had to clean up. The more you cleaned up, the less successful you were.
At least, that’s what I thought until I got a cat.*
If you’ve ever had a cat, one of the first things you learned to do was to clean out the litter box every day, because the alternative to NOT cleaning out the litter box was… unpleasant. After all, it’s not like the cat can clean out its own box. That requires opposable thumbs, and every time I try to staple thumbs on my cat, it just runs away.
Sometimes, sadly, there are messes we can’t clean up ourselves. At the time, we really wish/hope for someone else to come along, give us a cookie, and say, “Naw, you sit this one out. I got this.”
And if that’s what we want from other people, I guess we should be willing to clean up some messes that aren’t our own, from time to time.
I still wish those doctors would call their cranky patients themselves, though.
*Note: In no way is my every post from here on out going to mention my cat. I’m not frequenting THAT part of the Internet!
braddyverse 