Elmien Grove's Blog, page 4
May 20, 2010
When Good Oral Hygienists Go Bad
“We have arrived!” we murmured to ourselves, when we graduated Oral Hygiene, after two long years at university.
I should have smelled a rat, the first time I was called into the office to hear that wearing a bit of glitter around the eyes is considered unprofessional “around here”.
Most of us wanted to do what we studied, which entails consulting our own patients, teaching them about teeth and life and how the two interact, but it seemed like someone lied to us when we first started asking questions about this course.
“It’s the ideal profession for a lady”, they said.
“You can book your patients at convenient times”, they said.
Ja right.
This is how it works: orthodontists study for eons. First they study dentistry, then they work for a few years, then they go back and specialise in orthodontics.
As they finish, they murmur to themselves: “We have arrived!”
And in this case, it’s true.
They then set forth to conquer the world of money, I mean skew teeth.
Working on the patients themselves doesn’t make much sense since they’ll only be able to treat about fifteen a day, if they’re fast.
So, they came up with an ingenious plan of action: hire twelve oral hygienists (all female) to do the patients in their stead.
That way they can book 200 patients a day, glancing briefly into each one’s mouth, shouting orders to the bewildered girl, hovering next to them.
Great tip for orthodontists:
Tell the hygienists that they’re totally unemployable, when they come in for interviews, that way they’ll accept the pittance you’d call their monthly salary, once you’ve so generously hired them.
Continue insulting them throughout their employ, so they don’t wander off into the world of other, better professions.
Be strict on certain rules, e.g. “It is prohibited to sob helplessly while working on patients.”
“Crying will be confined strictly to the oral hygiene bathroom (separate from normal people bathrooms) and when emerging, eyes must look nice.”
“No ugly, smelly or rebellious oral hygienists will be tolerated.”
This kind of attitude spawned a new species at my workplace of the time:
The Mad Oral Hygienists of Moreleta Park.
These women almost invariably had some kind of substance problem, low self-esteem and would teeter on the edge of suicide if they weren’t drunk...which they were...all the time.
Interestingly enough, there was always a Dros across the road, no matter where I worked.
Some of us, working for Dr X, we’ll call him, found this to be wonderfully convenient and made a point of spilling into the pub at every spare moment, abusing the waiters, falling over old couples at corner-tables and systematically getting tremendously inebriated.
We’d then proceed to gossip wildly about all the girls that didn’t join us at that particular injunction.
Those other girls were off somewhere, drinking Earl Gray tea, calling us “drunken whores”, no doubt.
The hygienists at Dr X’s practise, where I worked for three years, split into two clearly-defined groups: “Die A-Span” (mommies with kiddies) and “Die Kring van die Spotters” (lesbians, smokers, druggies and drunks).
Naturally I fell into the latter (I was 23 years old, okay...don’t you judge me).
We had so much fun, almost taking ourselves out, all the time.
We laughed in the face of...well, other people quite frankly.
But, unfortunately when we weren’t out getting into trouble, we had to work our butts off for our elderly, increasingly demented boss in order to pay for our nasty habits...and the bills.
This work basically entailed wrestling little kids into dental chairs, forcing lip-retractors into their mouths and then mumbling threats at them, throughout the procedure to keep them from biting.
You’d think these (rabid) children would be the biggest obstacle in this field.
But you’d be wrong about that.
Ladies and gentleman, please welcome onto the stage...
“The Mad Mothers of Moreleta Park”.
While working for Dr X, we travelled to different cities every day to fork in more patients (money) so our senile employer can treat his family to gourmet holidays in Vegas every two weeks.
And every practise had its very own, special flavour of crazy mothers.
In Sandton, for instance, some came in looking like Barbie, laden down with 18-carate gold jewellery, dragged in by freckled little boys who would cause the most respectable of healthcare workers to gaze longingly at their boss’s cognac (mandatory in snob offices).
And if these “sweet” little things didn’t participate (they didn’t) their mothers would try and bribe them with ice-cream, toys and skiing-holidays in Switzerland.
They’d croon phrases like: “Is the nasty lady hurting you, schweetie?” and “Aw, now honey, stop gnawing on her hands or mommy won’t buy you that R1000 Transformer toy you wanted...”
In the beginning I was hard-pressed to be patient with the patients (the children) but as I got older and more experienced, I had more trouble being patient with their parents, who sometimes came in as a couple, clutching at each other as if their offspring was about to be executed.
But then sometimes, you’d be lucky enough to actually have an adult as a patient.
This, I felt, was like the psychological version of being on The Rack.
These adult patients cried more than all the kids I’ve ever treated, combined.
Screaming, kicking, biting little children are one thing...
Sobbing, hissing and threatening prosecution, adult patients take the cake.
And if they didn’t do those things, they talked.
They start seeing you as a strange kind of sadistic therapist. They’ll tell you about dresses they made when they were tweens, to sell to matriculants (for booze money, I suspect). They’ll elaborate on (all) their pregnancies (I lost a tooth with every child). They’ll jabber on about how fattening everything in South Africa is (can’t they manufacture mustard without adding sugar?!)
On and on and on, until finally you stuff their mouths with cotton rolls in a desperate attempt to stop the noise.
The thing I’ve gotten best at as an oral hygienist, however, was dodging things.
Bodily fluids become a part of life in this industry and hygienists will often find themselves in the unlucky position of being drooled over, peed on, bled at, and frequently having lunch-chunks blown their way (kids don’t hold back and boy can they aim well).
All of this sandwiched by the minibus-ride to and from the various destinations of work.
The twelve of us fought compulsively about everything we could think of.
Perhaps this was because half of us were hung-over and the other half pregnant.
The bus’s air conditioning was a favourite to bicker about. It seemed like all the cold air migrated to the back of the bus, causing those girls to freeze their asses off, while the front ones mopped the perspiration off their brows with leftover gauze patches.
Everyday someone would cry.
Everyday someone would physically attack someone else.
And everyday someone would stop the bus to hurl next to the road.
And to top everything off, our bus driver, Dick, scared the living shit out of us on a daily basis.
He drove like he had bought his licence on EBay.
One fateful day, he stopped the bus on a busy street, to take a nice long leak next to it, in full sight.
This didn’t go down too well with any of us.
At the time I was too horrified to consider the fact that he might have been taking a dig at us. We were, after all, complete bitches to the poor guy.
Our next driver was called Origin, which supplied us with endless hours of witty remarks.
Whenever something smelled funny on the bus, we’d loudly debate what “the origin” of the smell might be.
In hindsight, I’m surprised he didn’t kill us all.
Of course he tried, at some point after I had resigned, by wrapping the bus neatly around a tree.
As Murphy would have it, the girl who was engaged to be married in two weeks’ time was the only one who got hurt, and as a result had to spend her wedding on crutches.
The others just had hilarious carpet-burns on their foreheads from diving into the seats in front of them.
I guess my point to this whole piece is:
Don't allow anyone you care for to study oral hygiene.
Street Sweeiping would be a safer and more lucrative profession.
I should have smelled a rat, the first time I was called into the office to hear that wearing a bit of glitter around the eyes is considered unprofessional “around here”.
Most of us wanted to do what we studied, which entails consulting our own patients, teaching them about teeth and life and how the two interact, but it seemed like someone lied to us when we first started asking questions about this course.
“It’s the ideal profession for a lady”, they said.
“You can book your patients at convenient times”, they said.
Ja right.
This is how it works: orthodontists study for eons. First they study dentistry, then they work for a few years, then they go back and specialise in orthodontics.
As they finish, they murmur to themselves: “We have arrived!”
And in this case, it’s true.
They then set forth to conquer the world of money, I mean skew teeth.
Working on the patients themselves doesn’t make much sense since they’ll only be able to treat about fifteen a day, if they’re fast.
So, they came up with an ingenious plan of action: hire twelve oral hygienists (all female) to do the patients in their stead.
That way they can book 200 patients a day, glancing briefly into each one’s mouth, shouting orders to the bewildered girl, hovering next to them.
Great tip for orthodontists:
Tell the hygienists that they’re totally unemployable, when they come in for interviews, that way they’ll accept the pittance you’d call their monthly salary, once you’ve so generously hired them.
Continue insulting them throughout their employ, so they don’t wander off into the world of other, better professions.
Be strict on certain rules, e.g. “It is prohibited to sob helplessly while working on patients.”
“Crying will be confined strictly to the oral hygiene bathroom (separate from normal people bathrooms) and when emerging, eyes must look nice.”
“No ugly, smelly or rebellious oral hygienists will be tolerated.”
This kind of attitude spawned a new species at my workplace of the time:
The Mad Oral Hygienists of Moreleta Park.
These women almost invariably had some kind of substance problem, low self-esteem and would teeter on the edge of suicide if they weren’t drunk...which they were...all the time.
Interestingly enough, there was always a Dros across the road, no matter where I worked.
Some of us, working for Dr X, we’ll call him, found this to be wonderfully convenient and made a point of spilling into the pub at every spare moment, abusing the waiters, falling over old couples at corner-tables and systematically getting tremendously inebriated.
We’d then proceed to gossip wildly about all the girls that didn’t join us at that particular injunction.
Those other girls were off somewhere, drinking Earl Gray tea, calling us “drunken whores”, no doubt.
The hygienists at Dr X’s practise, where I worked for three years, split into two clearly-defined groups: “Die A-Span” (mommies with kiddies) and “Die Kring van die Spotters” (lesbians, smokers, druggies and drunks).
Naturally I fell into the latter (I was 23 years old, okay...don’t you judge me).
We had so much fun, almost taking ourselves out, all the time.
We laughed in the face of...well, other people quite frankly.
But, unfortunately when we weren’t out getting into trouble, we had to work our butts off for our elderly, increasingly demented boss in order to pay for our nasty habits...and the bills.
This work basically entailed wrestling little kids into dental chairs, forcing lip-retractors into their mouths and then mumbling threats at them, throughout the procedure to keep them from biting.
You’d think these (rabid) children would be the biggest obstacle in this field.
But you’d be wrong about that.
Ladies and gentleman, please welcome onto the stage...
“The Mad Mothers of Moreleta Park”.
While working for Dr X, we travelled to different cities every day to fork in more patients (money) so our senile employer can treat his family to gourmet holidays in Vegas every two weeks.
And every practise had its very own, special flavour of crazy mothers.
In Sandton, for instance, some came in looking like Barbie, laden down with 18-carate gold jewellery, dragged in by freckled little boys who would cause the most respectable of healthcare workers to gaze longingly at their boss’s cognac (mandatory in snob offices).
And if these “sweet” little things didn’t participate (they didn’t) their mothers would try and bribe them with ice-cream, toys and skiing-holidays in Switzerland.
They’d croon phrases like: “Is the nasty lady hurting you, schweetie?” and “Aw, now honey, stop gnawing on her hands or mommy won’t buy you that R1000 Transformer toy you wanted...”
In the beginning I was hard-pressed to be patient with the patients (the children) but as I got older and more experienced, I had more trouble being patient with their parents, who sometimes came in as a couple, clutching at each other as if their offspring was about to be executed.
But then sometimes, you’d be lucky enough to actually have an adult as a patient.
This, I felt, was like the psychological version of being on The Rack.
These adult patients cried more than all the kids I’ve ever treated, combined.
Screaming, kicking, biting little children are one thing...
Sobbing, hissing and threatening prosecution, adult patients take the cake.
And if they didn’t do those things, they talked.
They start seeing you as a strange kind of sadistic therapist. They’ll tell you about dresses they made when they were tweens, to sell to matriculants (for booze money, I suspect). They’ll elaborate on (all) their pregnancies (I lost a tooth with every child). They’ll jabber on about how fattening everything in South Africa is (can’t they manufacture mustard without adding sugar?!)
On and on and on, until finally you stuff their mouths with cotton rolls in a desperate attempt to stop the noise.
The thing I’ve gotten best at as an oral hygienist, however, was dodging things.
Bodily fluids become a part of life in this industry and hygienists will often find themselves in the unlucky position of being drooled over, peed on, bled at, and frequently having lunch-chunks blown their way (kids don’t hold back and boy can they aim well).
All of this sandwiched by the minibus-ride to and from the various destinations of work.
The twelve of us fought compulsively about everything we could think of.
Perhaps this was because half of us were hung-over and the other half pregnant.
The bus’s air conditioning was a favourite to bicker about. It seemed like all the cold air migrated to the back of the bus, causing those girls to freeze their asses off, while the front ones mopped the perspiration off their brows with leftover gauze patches.
Everyday someone would cry.
Everyday someone would physically attack someone else.
And everyday someone would stop the bus to hurl next to the road.
And to top everything off, our bus driver, Dick, scared the living shit out of us on a daily basis.
He drove like he had bought his licence on EBay.
One fateful day, he stopped the bus on a busy street, to take a nice long leak next to it, in full sight.
This didn’t go down too well with any of us.
At the time I was too horrified to consider the fact that he might have been taking a dig at us. We were, after all, complete bitches to the poor guy.
Our next driver was called Origin, which supplied us with endless hours of witty remarks.
Whenever something smelled funny on the bus, we’d loudly debate what “the origin” of the smell might be.
In hindsight, I’m surprised he didn’t kill us all.
Of course he tried, at some point after I had resigned, by wrapping the bus neatly around a tree.
As Murphy would have it, the girl who was engaged to be married in two weeks’ time was the only one who got hurt, and as a result had to spend her wedding on crutches.
The others just had hilarious carpet-burns on their foreheads from diving into the seats in front of them.
I guess my point to this whole piece is:
Don't allow anyone you care for to study oral hygiene.
Street Sweeiping would be a safer and more lucrative profession.
May 18, 2010
The Insect Revolution
Okay, so apart from the fact that I seem to have psychiatric problems, I also have a few other annoyances.
For instance: my house seems to dirty itself frequently and without warning.
Dust bunnies stream in from all four corners of the earth, calling up their local friends for a rendezvous at my place, so they can drink and multiply.
A while ago I decided to hire a cleaning lady who works at my sister's twice a week.
She seemed so totally awesome that I didn't even do an interview; I immediately hired her and organised her entry-card into my extremely secure, security complex.
If you don't have a card you can't gain entrance without first supplying the following: ID, passport, both your own and your parents' birth-certificates, a blood sample, a urine sample, a stool sample and some bone-marrow DNA.
You then sell your soul temporarily to the gatekeepers, which they will return to you, in reasonable condition, once you leave the complex, with the exception that you don't mysteriously acquire a flat screen TV in the time you visited.
Anyway, it seems like this cleaning lady and I had a slight miscommunication because she actually graduated with a masters' degree in professional egg-eating and not so much in house-cleaning.
So, after I was sadly retrenched from my job I spent way too much time sitting at home, whimpering into bags of O-Grady's.
And then the strangest thing happened.
The pristine veil of ignorance lifted from my eyes and I started noticing brown markings everywhere.
Like hieroglyphics only annoying and not interesting at all.
I'd swipe lazily at a smudge on the wall, stupidly causing a clean spot.
Then I'd have to either wash or repaint the entire thing for it to be an even colour.
I then noticed that the furniture, the ceiling, the light-fixtures, the carpets, the kitchen (yargh!), the garden and the pets were all horribly grimy.
I optimistically started scrubbing away with boiling hot, Handy Andy water and goldilocks.
It hurt to do this to the cats and once I've lost about a draught of blood, I gave up on them.
After a week of losing my mind more and more in this cleaning business (unpaid labour, I'll have you know) my house started looking marginally better.
But I've discovered loads of ants and miscellaneous other creatures living here, rent-free.
I methodically proceeded whiping them out with the help of "Diebug, Die, Die!" products.
Which was good, because my husband later confessed to me that he was getting a little bit tired of boiled-ant flavoured coffee.
I started growing a dark little moustache and cut my hair into an Austrian pot-cut.
I coloured it black...
The ants started referring to me as Hitler...
The Hitler of Ants...
I then went on to conquer the Black Widows in my garage.
My husband is terrified of spiders and in this case I had sympathy, since black widows aren't known to ask questions before they sink their teeth into a person.
I bug-bombed the hell out of them...
And was wracked with guilt when I went back into the garage and found the corpses of countless daddy-longlegs strewn across the garage-floor in mid-crawl.
An expression of disgust permanently frozen in their many, (so many) eyes.
The stuff must have smelt nasty because they all had that scrunched-up, I-detect-a-fart look on their faces.
I think that was their faces...
The mommy black widow was hanging upside down in her web, her alien-like eggs looking forlorn and orphaned in the corner of the ceiling.
I better still kill the little brats, before they hatch and snack on my family.
Word around town was that my new nickname was "The Antibug", since the "Hitler of Ants" no longer applied.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a little plaque erected in the corner of the garage, reading: "Here died the Widow of Falcon Crest 1. May she finally be at peace."
Other spiders would pay a small entrance fee to come and see the museum where The Great Fogger Massacre of 2010 occurred. If the people from Baygon are to be believed, these spiders too shall then die, because of the fine residue the Fogger is supposed to leave.
OH, the shame!
Anywho, I then went on to purchase something called "DYNEST" which is rumoured to cling to unsuspecting insects, which they then transport back to their nests, slaughtering every woman and child in the place.
I also sprayed something named "Wundergarten" on my half-dead Clivias, cutting down the pretty, but irritatingly hungry, caterpillars that recently moved in.
By this time I had lost my conscience completely and one of the more well-read caterpillars diagnosed me "A Sociopath".
Kind of like Dexter...but with bugs.
I started periodically checking my cats' and husband's pulses when they slept to be sure I haven't killed them as well.
I developed slight asthma from inhaling too many poisons of various natures.
The combination must have formed rudimentary LSD at some point because I distinctly remember seeing things in the garden that weren't supposed to be there.
Healthy Clivias, for instance.
The amazing egg-eating lady from Azkamamelodi had fled by now, never to return.
I suspect she saw something scary in my eyes.
"That wena, she had the eyes of the Tokolosh", she might later relay impressively to her friends.
I now sleep with a can of "Doom: The Odourless Killer" under my pillow, for fear of the insect-revolution.
And when they come...I'll be ready.
For instance: my house seems to dirty itself frequently and without warning.
Dust bunnies stream in from all four corners of the earth, calling up their local friends for a rendezvous at my place, so they can drink and multiply.
A while ago I decided to hire a cleaning lady who works at my sister's twice a week.
She seemed so totally awesome that I didn't even do an interview; I immediately hired her and organised her entry-card into my extremely secure, security complex.
If you don't have a card you can't gain entrance without first supplying the following: ID, passport, both your own and your parents' birth-certificates, a blood sample, a urine sample, a stool sample and some bone-marrow DNA.
You then sell your soul temporarily to the gatekeepers, which they will return to you, in reasonable condition, once you leave the complex, with the exception that you don't mysteriously acquire a flat screen TV in the time you visited.
Anyway, it seems like this cleaning lady and I had a slight miscommunication because she actually graduated with a masters' degree in professional egg-eating and not so much in house-cleaning.
So, after I was sadly retrenched from my job I spent way too much time sitting at home, whimpering into bags of O-Grady's.
And then the strangest thing happened.
The pristine veil of ignorance lifted from my eyes and I started noticing brown markings everywhere.
Like hieroglyphics only annoying and not interesting at all.
I'd swipe lazily at a smudge on the wall, stupidly causing a clean spot.
Then I'd have to either wash or repaint the entire thing for it to be an even colour.
I then noticed that the furniture, the ceiling, the light-fixtures, the carpets, the kitchen (yargh!), the garden and the pets were all horribly grimy.
I optimistically started scrubbing away with boiling hot, Handy Andy water and goldilocks.
It hurt to do this to the cats and once I've lost about a draught of blood, I gave up on them.
After a week of losing my mind more and more in this cleaning business (unpaid labour, I'll have you know) my house started looking marginally better.
But I've discovered loads of ants and miscellaneous other creatures living here, rent-free.
I methodically proceeded whiping them out with the help of "Diebug, Die, Die!" products.
Which was good, because my husband later confessed to me that he was getting a little bit tired of boiled-ant flavoured coffee.
I started growing a dark little moustache and cut my hair into an Austrian pot-cut.
I coloured it black...
The ants started referring to me as Hitler...
The Hitler of Ants...
I then went on to conquer the Black Widows in my garage.
My husband is terrified of spiders and in this case I had sympathy, since black widows aren't known to ask questions before they sink their teeth into a person.
I bug-bombed the hell out of them...
And was wracked with guilt when I went back into the garage and found the corpses of countless daddy-longlegs strewn across the garage-floor in mid-crawl.
An expression of disgust permanently frozen in their many, (so many) eyes.
The stuff must have smelt nasty because they all had that scrunched-up, I-detect-a-fart look on their faces.
I think that was their faces...
The mommy black widow was hanging upside down in her web, her alien-like eggs looking forlorn and orphaned in the corner of the ceiling.
I better still kill the little brats, before they hatch and snack on my family.
Word around town was that my new nickname was "The Antibug", since the "Hitler of Ants" no longer applied.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a little plaque erected in the corner of the garage, reading: "Here died the Widow of Falcon Crest 1. May she finally be at peace."
Other spiders would pay a small entrance fee to come and see the museum where The Great Fogger Massacre of 2010 occurred. If the people from Baygon are to be believed, these spiders too shall then die, because of the fine residue the Fogger is supposed to leave.
OH, the shame!
Anywho, I then went on to purchase something called "DYNEST" which is rumoured to cling to unsuspecting insects, which they then transport back to their nests, slaughtering every woman and child in the place.
I also sprayed something named "Wundergarten" on my half-dead Clivias, cutting down the pretty, but irritatingly hungry, caterpillars that recently moved in.
By this time I had lost my conscience completely and one of the more well-read caterpillars diagnosed me "A Sociopath".
Kind of like Dexter...but with bugs.
I started periodically checking my cats' and husband's pulses when they slept to be sure I haven't killed them as well.
I developed slight asthma from inhaling too many poisons of various natures.
The combination must have formed rudimentary LSD at some point because I distinctly remember seeing things in the garden that weren't supposed to be there.
Healthy Clivias, for instance.
The amazing egg-eating lady from Azkamamelodi had fled by now, never to return.
I suspect she saw something scary in my eyes.
"That wena, she had the eyes of the Tokolosh", she might later relay impressively to her friends.
I now sleep with a can of "Doom: The Odourless Killer" under my pillow, for fear of the insect-revolution.
And when they come...I'll be ready.
