Daily Report: The Squeaky Wheel

Bad day of work today... but as always on Mondays. Nothing new there. At least I limited myself to a plate of asparagus for lunch. I ate chips and salsa for dinner... not quite as good or healthy.

I made a mistake today: My job is to work the overnight shift in America (daytime here in Thailand) transcribing medical reports that have to be returned to the hospitals they are sent from very quickly... otherwise known as "STAT work". (You know... they say it on hospital TV programs all the time: "Get me 2 units of A positive blood, STAT!!!")

Every Sunday-overnight-to-Monday, the number of jobs that I get from my regular hospitals runs really low, and I wind up in these really annoying accounts from two university hospitals in Texas. Jobs are sent to me on a priority that is established by my boss. It is basically just a "hierarchy of hospitals", with one hospital's work being more important than another's. When work runs out in one, I start getting work from the next hospital down the list.

My mistake was to write to my boss and say that the Texas hospitals' work was not really STAT work, and that further down in this hierarchy past Texas were other jobs waiting for me to transcribe that were much more important. (And, yes, I'll admit: The jobs further down were not much more important... just less annoying than the Texas work.)

My boss e-mailed the person in charge of the Texas accounts, who is also in charge of all of the STAT accounts that I work on that are further UP the hierarchy and further DOWN the hierarchy from the Texas hospitals, to ask if removing the Texas jobs from my list of accounts was alright.

The person in charge of those accounts said (in essence), "Well, actually, the jobs that Jil wants to do below the Texas jobs aren't really STAT jobs, and... now that I think about it, most of the jobs that Jil does above the Texas jobs aren't really STAT jobs either... and now that I think about it, most of the jobs that Jil does which are STAT jobs can actually be handled by our office in India. We probably don't really need Jil doing STAT work anymore."

Oops.

And that is how you lose your 20% pay bonus for doing STAT work.

(Well, it isn't the end of the world: The 20% STAT bonus is on my base pay only, to which is also added a high-production bonus, a weekend bonus, and an overtime bonus... so in the end it works out to about a 10% reduction in take-home pay... or about 16,000 baht per month.)