Why I never answer the phone when you call

I hate talking. I’m no darn good at it.

When I’m writing I can stare at my screen for fifteen minutes while I try to remember the word “potential,” or “blue” but whenever I do that mid-conversation, my companions either assume I’m medicated and take advantage of the opportunity to poke me in the eye, or get bored and wander off.

I especially hate telling coworkers that I have already proof-read a story or article. You see, until this very moment I never thought of using the word “proof.” Mostly I use “edit,” since I was for some time known as the “editor” and that worked fine unless I was forced to use it in past tense.

Picture this. I walk up to one of my staff members and say, “Why did you leave this story on my desk, I’ve already edited it.” But it comes out sounding like “edididid” (try it, you’ll see) and is always followed by a puzzled silence. The staff member adds a subtly cocked eyebrow which means he’s either counting the days until he gets my job, or he’s contemplating poking me in the eye. He stares hard at his screen. I stomp back to my desk and make annoying style changes to his story.

Right now I am saved from these awkward moments by being the lowest person on the staff at my current duty station. In fact, I’m a volunteer. I work here to keep from being bored to the point of numbness and from having to watch endless “Maury” reruns, in which countless young girls discover that Joe Bob is in fact, NOT the father, and run sobbing of the stage, shouting incomprehensibly at stage hands and cameramen.

The one and only downside to being a lowly staff-writer, instead of an editor, is my current editor’s policy of sending all my stories to their subjects for proofing prior to publication.

This is by far the most infuriating and helpful way to practice humility that I know of. I work for a hospital newsletter (not a medical journal. It’s important to note the difference). My job is to interview doctors, then simplify what they say so the average Joe can understand it.

The problem is, doctors are smart and they want people to know it. The fact that they all successfully passed medical school is not enough. If they read the article and are quoted as saying something that makes sense to people with simple master’s or bachelor’s degrees, they can’t stand the humiliation. Even though they actually said it, it looks so wrong on paper. “Oh no,” they think. “My colleagues will not think I’m smart if they read this! This can’t go to print!”

This is the fun part. The doctor immediately sits down and rewrites the article from start to finish. He spends several hours doing this, possibly even canceling a few appointments. It is not easy to change sentences like “We help providers learn how to treat patients well,” to “This division assists clinicians in providing better quality care by instructing them on the basics of patient-provider communication techniques and initiative guidelines that improve healthcare outcomes. Not to mention hyperlipidimia.” Not only does this make no sense, but nobody cares.

They are also unfamiliar with the rules of news-writing, so when I get the story back, I have to spend several hours undoing the changes so my peers in the journalism world will think I am smart.