I’ve decided to try for a Grand Rounds post, because this week’s theme – “hot” – is unequivocally awesome. (The fact that I’m bad at theme writing isn’t stopping me, as you can tell from this post’s title.) (See what I did up there? That’s called “ingenuity”. Or “trying too hard”. Potato, po-tah-to.)
1. Discovering that spell-check would never again be on my side.
Spell-check: We used to be friends.
And now you don’t work.
Sure, I could just turn it off forever – in fact, I did. But then I immediately sent a formal proposal where I misspelled “function”, by leaving out the ‘n’. And yes, the recipient noticed the horror of the pronunciation.
A small piece of my academic soul died that day.
2. That time the med school dorm decided to test every smoke alarm.
Pictured: HELL. Photo credit: MY FORSAKEN SHELL OF A LIFE.
Every smoke alarm, in over 150 rooms. Over 3 days of med school. And, note:
This: Didn't happen. At all.
3. That time we were assigned 250 pages of reading in one day
A day too dark to document. (Well, except, I sort of did.) Still – moving on!
4. The discovery that “slacker” and “gunner” didn’t mean quite what I thought they did.
In fact, they kind of get thrown around a lot. Like… a lot.
Pictured: Why you shouldn't care what other people think of your studying habits.
5. Reliving it all, in glorious detail, at the end of the year.
Action Potential 
This was freaking hilarious AP. All of these things happened to me too. Oh, except instead of the smoke alarm thing, we had the fire alarm thing. Damn you idiots who open your doors to let your cooking smoke into the communal hallway!!! I’m so glad I have a house now and this is why.
Thanks. Wow, when will people learn to open the *window* instead of the door? THE WINDOW, people!
Can’t wait until I’m a real person living in real housing.
I am still cracking up. And I’d like to ask, were you actually sleeping when the fire alarms went off, because they did that to us in our freshman dorms, and I can guarantee that only like 1/4 of the dorm was actually asleep at 1 am…
Haha, I *was*, but it was my own damn fault. (They started testing the alarms each morning at 9am, but I like to sleep late!) They went ’til 5pm each day with the tests, though – none of us napped that week…
I had a coworker who blew up one of the hospital microwaves by microwaving her coworker’s wet socks (I think she was trying to…dry them?)
The spellcheck thing..I can totally relate now that I am helping build electronic assessments and orders on a daily basis. You would think that somebody out there would develop a medical spellcheck for Word. Seriously, there must be a big market for this. Instead, I have turned into the human spell-checker. Good thing I know how to spell hemorrhoid.
That is an amazing story. A woman who microwaves someone else’s wet socks is a woman after my own heart…
I love your blog, and I had to laugh at this entry because this is almost exactly like my last heavily-academic semester at nursing school. Except instead of a fire alarm we had an hours-long power outage. Dear iPhone flashlight app: I love you forever.
Even now as I type my pediatrics notes, spellcheck is ragefacing at me. Angry little red lines. Angry.
Haha, thanks! Man, spell-check is so good at ragefacing. (Which is now my new favorite word..)
Download a medical dictionary plugin for Word! I battled the squiggly red lines for years until someone was like “duh what are you doing” and now all my documents look way prettier.
That is a solid idea!
Holy crap. Please tell me that word doc was a review sheet for some big test, not just few hours of lecture, because it’s seriously intimidating. I was reading to see if I could learn a few fun facts, but it appears to be in some strange other language.
And the fire alarm thing… man, sunday of finals week sophomore year, someone actually lit a garbage can on fire at 3 AM in the dorms. Didn’t get back to bed until 4:30. I remember talking outside to one poor girl who was actually a commuter, but had a monday morning final in a few hours and was bunking in a spare bed so she could sleep in some. She was very unhappy. Contrast that with the shared house I’m in now, where we had a legit stove fire, flames and smoke and everything… and it was all taken care of in 3-heartpounding minutes. I’ve lost where I was going with this, but I thinks it’s this: dorm fire alarms suck.
I barely even remember that stuff now… But it must have been multiple lectures, because I don’t see how else I would’ve connected mAChRs with leukotrienes and NSAIDs. So no worries!
Dorm fire alarms DO suck. In undergrad, I lived in a scholarship sorority, and I can emphatically state that living in a small house with 50 other girls? Actually managed to be better than dorm-living, because of the lack of dorm fire alarms. In short: I will put up with a lot of crap to avoid random fire alarms!
Love the bar scene at the end. Despite what we all think, as soon as we get together with some booze between us, the stories and shop-talking come right back up. You can’t escape it, so might as well enjoy it.