Calfgrit7 was sick last night. He threw up a couple times, and Cowgrit put him to bed in our bed — don’t want him vomiting from atop his upper bunk bed. By 8:30, he’d gone about an hour and a half without problem so we were hoping it was probably over.

Then, as Cowgrit and I were shutting the house down for the night — she to sleep in our bed with the sick CG, and me to write my post and then to sleep in the guest room — we heard Calfgrit7 heaving. He was so much asleep that he didn’t wake up, and we got into the bedroom just in time to see a volcano of vomit bubble up from his mouth and run down his face. Yes, it’s as nasty as it sounds.

We spent the next half-hour cleaning the boy and the bed. You have to have children to really learn just how far into disgusting you can go. In my case last night, I was literally up to my elbows in it. After the initial eruption, I held him up so he could lean over a small trash can.

I noted the mess and asked Cowgrit, “Why would he have red in his vomit?”

“Um,” Cowgrit thought for a moment, “strawberries. They had some strawberries tonight.”

“Good.” Bringing up strawberries is much better than the first thought that ran through my mind.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I was in the hospital to visit someone having a procedure performed. While I was there, they were hauled off for the operation. It was supposed to be only one to two hours, so I hung out in the room waiting. I laid in the bed and surfed through the TV channels — something I don’t often get to do. My wait ended up being four hours, and during that time I had a few visitors.

One of the visitors was a young guy, probably a college student, carrying a clipboard. He explained that he was going around the rooms taking a survey of the hospital service.

“Well,” I said, “I’m not the patient. Sorry.” Note: I was fully dressed, even with tennis shoes on, and lying on top of the covers, not under them. I also had no wrist band on my arm, that all patients wear.

“Oh,” he replied. He looked a little knocked off balance.

I smiled and said, “I can answer your survey if it relates to sitting in bed and watching the television.”

He gathered himself and looked at his clipboard. “Thank you. How would you rate the nursing staff’s attention?”

“I don’t know,” I answered with a humored smile.

“Oh, OK. How would you rate . . .” He asked a couple more questions before it seemed to get through to him that I wasn’t the patient, and I couldn’t answer his questions. I chuckled every time I had to say, “I don’t know.”

When the concept seemed to sink in, I repeated, “I’m not the patient here. I’m waiting for the patient to return from surgery.”

“Oh, yeah, OK,” he said with a look of understanding finally crossing his face. “Well, thank you.” And then he left.

I turned the volume back up on the TV and continued clicking through the channels.

He looked like a nice kid, but he was really nervous and relying on his clipboard routine to get him through his duties.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I went to a training course a couple days ago. The course was for basic-level information on a general subject (how’s that for vague?), but I’d been looking forward to it for a few weeks. It was scheduled for four hours, but the instructor said he was in a hurry and we could get through the material in two hours — and we did.

Overall, the course was not as interesting as I had hoped. I was a bit disappointed, but it wasn’t really particularly bad — I did learn a little something. The next day I got an evaluation form for the class.

Your response to the following questions will help us continue to enhance our educational efforts. Provide comments for ratings of 1 or 2.

It was a series of five questions like:

Overall Rating Of This Training Session
Poor 1     |     Fair 2     |     Good 3     |     Outstanding 4

I thought the course, materials, and instructor were just Fair, and I was willing to say so. But the bold note in the evaluation instructions gave me pause. I didn’t have time to write out comments about something I don’t think highly about to begin with. It was something that turned out to not be worth my time to attend, and now their wanting me to spend more time explaining to them why I didn’t consider it above fair?

The class suddenly jumped in quality. I marked “Good 3” for each item and shoved the evaluation form out of my way. Yeah, my doing that is just perpetuating the less than good quality, and I feel a twinge of guilt about letting them get away with it. By setting up the instructions like they did, they’re skewing the results by nudging people to do like I did — answer above what is needed for further effort.

I’ve written evaluation forms, myself, in my career. This is a prime example of how you shouldn’t write such things. If you want an honest answer, don’t force the respondent to put in more effort for certain answers. Of course, this assumes you want an honest answer and not a skewed result. In this case, it might be that the ones asking the question wanted to skew the results higher for their own benefit.

I wonder, was this evaluation form just badly written or intentionally skewed?

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com