Another week closer to to Retirement Day, now in four weeks. Sort of an eventful week, too.
Anyone working in health care is familiar with surveys. Hospitals get visits from the Joint Commission on Health Care Organizations. Their labs are surveyed by the College of American Physicians. Nursing homes and home care agencies are visited by surveyors from their respective states. Typically, these surveys are a requirement for reimbursement, so they can be a big deal for the organization. This week, a trio of surveyors from Denver arrived unannounced (as is routine) to survey my current employer.
I've tried estimate how many surveys of all types I've been involved with over the last few decades. It's about 30, I think. I've learned to maintain all my required documentation in a survey-ready state, which leads to far less anxiety, so when my boss dropped in to announce the survey I wasn't too concerned. And, in fact, when we reached the exit conference Wednesday afternoon the surveyors were mostly complimentary. My interview with the survey team was about 40 minutes. When it was over, I made a sort of curtain call speech, telling them I was on the cusp of retiring, and thanking them for making my last survey such a pleasant experience. I got a standing ovation.
On Thursday afternoon we had scheduled a meeting for the Quality Assurance Committee. We hadn't held one since last fall when the COVID-19 precautions made assembly risky and then various staff were absent due to quarantine requirements. A week earlier, I sent a reminder email to committee members asking them to save the date. Then, while my agency was handling the survey process, I spent three days writing a report summarizing all the data collected in 2020 plus a summary of the first quarter of 2021.
I was the only one who showed up. Oh, well. I did my part.
So I had a high and a low to mark the beginning of my last month in the business. About right, I think.
Now, on to explaining the title of this post. It's a lyric from a Grateful Dead song, "Cumberland Blues". The "Little Ben clock" is a mechanical clock some readers may not have experienced. Generally fairly accurate, these clocks are powered by an internal spring that requires manual winding regularly with some sort of key or crank.
As I get closer to Retirement Day, my friends are asking me how close I am, and when I say "a month", for instance, I'm often told something along the lines of, "Congratulations! What an achievement!"
But, you know, it doesn't feel like an "achievement". Writing that last QA report was "an achievement". Getting through that survey without any deficiencies cited was "an achievement". Looking at 27 days before retirement feels more like I'm a Little Ben clock that hasn't been wound lately, as I feel the pace of my workday slow down more and more. In about a month, my career clock will tick one last time. That's not an achievement, that's just another expression of entropy.
