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Good morning … it’s just me. We’re getting a late start this morning cuz it’s already quarter to 8 am. We were reading some news stories for the last hour or so. Not sure why … just was. Then the last part we got into people living in the most expensive houses and such. I can’t help but to be impressed with Bill Gates 66,000 square foot compound. Hehehe if I were to be a billionaire – that’s just how I’d want it! And you can be pretty sure I wouldn’t own a merry-go-round. Hmpf!Soooo, in other worlds. How goes things this morning? Hmm, Kitties are happy, we’re happy, our friend was happy last night. Ahh there’s a place to start … our friend. Anything new there? Well, sortofnew. Sometimes when he comes over and we have sandwiches they are from different locations … AHA! Bet you didn’t know that! ;)
Last night was one from some grocery store deli and it was very nice. Those are my favorite kind because they do have good roast beef and cheese and veggies and stuff, but the really favor the best bread. I’ll eat subway, but think most of them taste about the same and their bread is like a sponge. Bleh!
Well, then yes we played. A little here a little there … well, you know just play
Both of us had a chance to unwind as well. He’s thinking of business deals, we’re thinking about how surreal our business life is. ESPECIALLY … if you’ve made it to Friday. Your left with the thought … well wasn’t that queer?
Going back as far as yesterday … Let’s see … got to work two hours late, because our bank didn’t open until 9 am. If I had known that from the start, I would have stopped in a currency exchange. But, then I don’t know how much those people charge and I didn’t have the extra $5 bucks or more. So we found ourselves sitting outside the bank listening to music trying to relax when I would have much more preferred to be at work. I think that part of the deal was that we had been staying at work late and didn’t want to get going, but I think I already wrote about that.
So, anyway … we got to work and I think we did that, but I can’t remember quite what we worked on. Let me think. I can’t remember. I know we worked on this one set of stuff, but I don’t remember whether it was before lunch, after lunch, or after thinking group. Shoot, hate that when it happens. I know I’ll write a second about thinking group and then just group the rest the day as if one. Hehehehe yup that’ll work.
Umm, thinking group … well we had it and it was fine, nice. Everything went ok.
But, nothing major great. We are working on the 2nd meeting where we discuss things that go into the business of the Center. Last week we had done input from the individuals served, personnel, and other stakeholders, and this time we messed with aspects of the business … like we started with what are minutes like of business notes and then we went to surveys. After that we got into ethics and we stayed there for the rest of the time. I want them to understand what it is we do for them and what to expect from us. Oh yeah and we’d done grievance too. Umm, the grievance we didn’t go so far because I’d set up scenarios where they had a complaint about something at the center, or against the Administrator. BUT, I couldn’t get them to complain or think of complaining, because they thought complaining was a bad idea. *Sigh* They’re just too nice. Darn. Unfortunately, it shouldn’t be that easy to please … tried to explain that maybe sometime one would have a better idea and want it expressed, but they said no … the sister is the boss. Hmm, ok we’ll have to work on that later after we regroup. So, then ok … those other two you should know that we acted them out … so for minutes I practiced taking minutes and then I said that was handy because later we could and we did at the end of the meeting go back to them to help us remember what we’d learned at the start.
And, then with the survey we took a few just to give them the idea. Ok, finally getting back to the ethics … we found ourselves going over things in terms one at a time trying to explain what all that was about. They have good curious minds so that seems to work out nicely. We try to explain concepts such as what is quality of life, being treated of equal well-being, or hmm, like what is dignity. That last one I liked a lot. I pointed out the one fella that always talks about being treated with respect. Everyone seems to know that one. But, as soon as I said it and eyes were directed toward the swelling chest of that person, then I said excitedly … you see, you see … that look on his face and the good feeling that he is feeling right this moment? That is feeling your dignity! I just love those kinds of moments. I don’t think they will remember the word dignity, but they may remember that we all talked of that special space in time as having a special meaning. We can spend a lot of time in the here and now of the little things … and gradually we will find we’ve come together toward some special place … and all the while we’ll have been happy.
Oh there was one other thing … well, it sort leans in from something else, because we weren’t so happy with our peer, but jumping to the chase here the last thing she did and I didn’t like was that she waited until 2 minutes before the Thinking Group meeting and then she announced over the loud speaker the names of the President and Vice President according to the Town Hall elections. That is a terrible thing to do, because she should have kept her business to her own meeting, or she should have gone to all the rooms individually. It isn’t something that sister would have approved of going over the intercome, and it wasn’t fair to break that kind of news right as my meeting was starting because it was intrusive. BECAUSE … since I believe that whole thing to be rigged, I don’t give it much importance. It is only important during that meeting and it seems to consume way too much time. The only thing you get from being president is to sit at the table with the other Q during her meeting. Blah. BUT, as we said its rigged. For the last 5 years the client that I think is most worthy … one of my clients never gets chosen. I’ve heard the Q and the Administrator say things like I hope she isn’t going to get elected (she would tend to gather a big head), and the Q respond, don’t worry, she won’t be. So … bottom line I don’t trust that system … and this particular girl should have been helped if that was going to be a problem and going back to yesterday … It was then something I had to handle in my meeting because she was so upset she was going to sabatogue my meeting by moping through it. BLAH!
Soooooo long story short … we took care of that as we may … and because I am the person that I am … explained it has nothing to do with thinking group. I told the girl as far as I was concerned because she is a natural leader and voices her opinions and supports communicating others opnions that she would always have a top-ranked position in this meeting. And, that is the truth. I’ve long since considered the leader of the clients. The other deal … staff lead political power at its worst.
I think the problem was that Sr. had left the building and it was supposed it be for the rest of the day and it was. We had previous to her leaving a couple visitors in from the state. The first was there to see a client from another based agency and the second was to see three of my clients. Sister handled the first one … and I was taking care of the second. She was sitting at the desk beside my room going over work on the computer … I love this one because she’s so unique … she’s just got a certain amount of style and that radiates from inside her … I’d been already though put out … because the other Q came back and stood in the door way between the state worker and me and went on and on and on … about how sister tells her immediately of any big decisions. We were only talking about whether or not there was going to be a thinking group. I wasn’t sure because sister had been trying to give me time for CARF and because the state was in. To great nausea the Q was trying to tell the state through me that she was in charge … and we just weren’t going there. We were saying not to upset things too much … Yah. Uh huh, sure. We told her factually … if sister had wanted to make a change, she would have announced it herself over the intercom. Then we turned back to our work. Like please go away you’re bothering me. If sister was around … she wouldn’t have done that because I would have said.
Hmm, let me go ask that to sister directly. THEN, after leaving she came back in about 10 minutes to discus grrrrrrrrrrr one of her clients. BUT she was only pretending to talk about him … in reality … she just wanted to again put herself out as better or more important than she was. I listened to it for about 15 minutes and I was starting to feel ill. SOOOOO I took a 20 minute lunch. When I came back … she was just finishing up. But the poor lady was sick of it at the first 15 minutes. Just no sense of that at all. Like PLEASE GO AWAY!
EH … done is done … it may or may not come up again with Sister next week … but I gotta put it out of my mind right now. I refuse to have her sideswipe my brain any longer.
My feeling on people from the State is that they are for the most part regular people doing a job in which is overwhelming in the amount of work expected to get done and that probably are given good job security and enough money, though the hours are long and the peers are back-biting. If I have this much problem with one peer … how bad could it be with 20 peers always sharing the same office. Soo, my position on that is to give them some information … yesterday’s was that we were still expecting state and CARF (I try to keep my information short and swee) and then I devote the rest of my time for listening to them. It might start with talk of the clients, but usually it goes to them unfolding whatever burden they are carrying … usually business related. I try never to tell one of them what the other has said, because I figure I’ve got to be a person they could trust or I wouldn’t be doing them any service. I also try to have my business with them completed on top … so that when they look at my records the information is up to date. That helps them take themselves out of the guardians role. If we are just doing our jobs then there are no reprimands. The cool thing is like yesterday … I get a sense of how our whole business goes from the point of our position as middle managers. The people I deal with at this level don’t usually direct and they aren’t usually working everyday with the same clients. We usually are college educated and manage caseloads.
The cool part is hard to figure out as to writing it, but we’re going to try anyway. It is important to me to figure out where our position is over my real peers in the bigger world unless one of these folks gives me some break and lets me know how I’m doing. If this would have been 500 years ago … they would be the statesman going from one kingdom to another passing on information as to how the world was working. I’d again not be the king or queen, but definitely up pretty high in the court. Hehehe … I’d be the one who had forgotten to wear our three pronged pointy purple and gold hat. From what I get generally from this one and others is that I am pretty organized. But, I am unsure what else my reputation is other than most come in generally feel comfortable sitting back and talking and I usually give them some good amount of time and I usually enjoy the visits a lot.
Ok, ok … we’re feeling calm again … that’s nice
SOOOO, now onto the other part of our day, you know when we were doing work that was more work like. I guess its just that I want to get to the point of remembering where we were because we were feeling so good about it. It had to do with the CARF stuff. Maybe if I can remember our way into the thoughts. First thing I remember is that the work had started the day before. I remember getting toward the end of the day and then really thinking I was going to do our best to focus in on the CARF work … wherever we were at. I don’t know where we were at the rest of the week. Oh yes, now I remember. We’d been finishing up with some report writing. AHA! That’s what we did yesterday morning. We finished up the last mini report. It had been on Risk Analysis. Pshwoo … And, I remember that we’d asked sister to do a couple of standards before she left and we put a few books on her desk to read some reports if she had time. She had told us on Thursday that she’d wanted to be doing something CARF like to help and then the Second sister mentioned when we’d passed in the night that the first sister might be really in need of something to do. Well, you can imagine we started to look pretty soon there after, because if nothing else there’s enough CARF to go around. We gave her sections on finances and volunteers and pointed out the sections where they were looking for proof that there was job postings and something else similar, because I knew that we hadn’t had both … and that was a good thorny problem for her to figure out. I wasn’t as sure I wanted to give her reports because I didn’t want to spend a lot of time going over them for corrections … I just wanted them to be done and I didn’t have time to mess around.
I had thought of giving her work to do with policies and procedures, but I didn’t think she’d hold that all in the right frame of mind. Repeatedly she says that we have enough because the lawyers had approved the ones she’s turned in, but she’s not been dealing with a whole stack of them that she doesn’t have direct access to.
I’ve given her complete packets, but she only wants to recognize the ones that are in the book she has already. I didn’t make up those other policies … she’s just forgotten about them … I think. I could be wrong … just know that it’s very hard for her to accept change even though CARF is saying THIS IS WHAT WE WANT. Sister is also very quick to wave things aside and say … we got that we got that … without doing so much work to figure out what we do and do not have. Like we said … Thursday, we got a handle enough on the reports that we’d started looking at policies and procedures. We chose one they were asking for at the top of the heap.
First one was on confidentiality, and we also got that night to the one on privacy.
What we did was do a search on the computer and it pulled up about a dozen documents between the two that had something to do with that. I was pretty impressed. We had printed out a copy of both and I wasn’t sure what to do with all that, but we were working on it, until we discovered it was 6:30 pm and time to go home. Sometime after lunch yesterday we decided to try handling that mess. So, we put on our brave Brownie face and went in at it again.
We had to figure out … well that was fine … now we have those papers … we’ve got about 60 more to go … what’s going to be the plan. First problem was what to do with all those papers? Here we had them, but we’re against starting to stack papers around our desk. Just too much mess. And, then we thought … Hmm, that’s what we’re supposed to be using our paper tiger for … for the hell of it … let’s see how many citations come up with those same keywords confidentiality and privacy. Wow … That was cool. Between the two there were probably about 30-35 citations. It was a little intimidating … so we thought … we’d better check this out with the little words … so we in turn looked up retaliation and something else … I forget right now … But, sure enough … each of those words too had about 6-12 citations. Though ok, this really honest to God might work. We started with the retaliation one … with the confidentiality it turned out that there really was a pol and proc. Just for it, which we can never remember, but for retaliation there was nothing on pol and proc. There were a couple of things like from the general assembly and United Nations such as major declarations of rights toward people with developmental disability. Oh I know the other word … humiliation. CARF was saying we want pol and proc on these things. Well my way is sure … why not? Sounds good to me. I thought if there was any chance in desparate hell that sister was going to approve then I better keep it nice and simple for her and those lawyers. So I took up my own policy of nothing newer than I could cross-find in the work that was already established through our hundreds of documents already listed in either our big computer or the paper tiger.
Before the end of our time – had to leave at about 4 to catch our friend … I’d written then from this work 2 new policies and I’d redone the first. WoooHOOO … REAL WORK GETTING DONE! Oh man was it a beauty … like in the one on confidentiality … I was able to add something that was being done on the technology plan toward that end. That was a nice update … and the really fun part? As we read down the documents … it was like oh man this reference good two other policies and procedures that mentioned confidentiatlity … so I said on the bottom … SEE: ……… and then we found a couple resources that were from State regulations … WOW … see …… 119.231.
hehehe sounded real good. Then it was like there was something from the policy book … that’s the one Sr. favors …
Whoops … silly moment here … got distracted and made a picture for David and Deb.
Wooo HOOO!!!
Ok, you … stop being so giddy! SOOOOOOOOOORYYYY
Ok, back … and there was stuff from the clients rights book and etc. etc. whoops talking to my son now on the phone … hold on.
Nice!!! That was my oldest son … we talked for a while mostly about his business he let me help with an outline. That’s all we’re going to say … ‘cept we love the pieces out of him! Hehehe I tried to get a hold of
posted by Ann Marie @ 3/10/2007 08:17:00 PM
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