I suppose the one good thing to come of reality television is the fact that there are still some shows to watch right now. The ongoing writers’ union strike has MTV singing and dancing about “proof” that The Hills is, as it were, “Unwritten.”

Last night was the Season Three finale of The Hills. Despite the fact that Lauren has actually begun saying meaningful things without sounding or looking as much like a walking cliché as she did in the first 2.5 seasons (and all of Laguna Beach), something was missing from this episode, something I remember fondly from all episodes prior. Ohhhh, what was it, what was it?

Ah yes, dialogue. And what have they left us with? The Meaningful Look.

We entered this episode expecting some sort of resolution in the ongoing breakup-or-make up Heidi/Spencer romance. They fought (again), he walked out (again), he comes back (again), she wants to wait for or call off the wedding (again). This is basically what happened when he comes back to their apartment and finds her packing her suitcase in the living room (who packs in the living room?).

Spencer:
What’s up, stranger?

Heidi:
Where have you been?

Spencer:
What are you doing?

Heidi:
Meaningful Look.

Spencer:
Meaningful Look.

Heidi:
I’m going home for awhile. I need some space.

Spencer:
Home, like back to Colorado?

Heidi:
Yeah.

Spencer:
Meaningful Look.

Heidi:
Meaningful Look.

Spencer:
You can stay here, I can go to my parents’ or something.

Heidi:
I just think we both need some space-

Spencer:
I don’t need any space.

Heidi:
- and some time to think about what we want.

Spencer:
I know exactly what I want.

Heidi:
Meaningful Look.

Spencer:
Meaningful Look.

Heidi:
Meaningful Look.

Spencer:
Meaningful Look.

And so on, until we see Heidi in her car driving down the freeway, casting Meaningful Looks in her rearview mirror. There’s a brief moment of anticipation that she might run into Whitney and Lauren at LAX, as the sappy music montage now includes shots of those two heading to the airport to go to Paris. Maybe Heidi and Lauren will see each other on an escalator and exchange nostalgic Meaningful Looks, and then Lauren will turn to Whitney with a Meaningful Eye Roll, followed by a Meaningful Puppy Pout!

But no such luck. Flash back to Spencer giving a Meaningful Look to the coffee table.

Even Brody got a few Meaningful Looks in during this episode. Audrina didn’t get a thing, poor girl. Something tells me that since she’s done exchanging Meaningful Looks with Justin Bobby, she won’t be getting much camera time unless she (or a writer, but wait, there are no writers!) thinks of something to say.

So, heparin.

The big news in both healthcare and Hollywood now is heparin. A fiasco at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles left Dennis Quaid’s infant twins and another child in critical condition after receiving an overdose of the drug heparin. A HUGE overdose.

Heparin is used for two things. In small doses, called a hep-lock, it is used to flush IV lines. This is usually a concentration of 10 U/ml. The larger dose of heparin is an anticoagulant often used in patients who are immobilized and in danger of developing blood clots. This is usually a concentration of 10,000 U/ml. Bit of a difference.

Even if our medication administration at The Hospital is 99.99999% accurate, we will have 3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO). To put that in perspective… my hospital has about 950 patients at max capacity. Let’s figure conservatively and say each patient receives 15 medication doses per day. That’s 14,250 opportunities for defects every day, 5.2 million defect opportunities every year in this hospital alone. Even with 99.99999% accuracy, that’s 17.68 defects. If we drop down to 99.99946% accuracy, we have 28.08 defects. Drop down to 98% accuracy and that’s 92,893 medication errors in this hospital alone over the course of the year – statistically speaking. This is what they taught me in Lean/Six Sigma class.

So medication errors are a matter of concern. Some are pretty inconsequential… miss a dose of aspirin, get your antibiotics an hour before your next scheduled dose… these are errors, but they’re not really going to hurt anyone. They count in that statistical probability thing. And even though we put every precaution we can think of in place around here,  in 92,893 medication errors in a year, we could have some serious problems, as Cedars-Sinai is right now. Ours just don’t make national news because we rarely see movie stars around here.

Dennis and Kimberly Quaid’s kiddos are going to be fine. I guess the other kid is too, but not being a celebuspawn, his/her condition is not splashed around the tabloids.

Cedars issued a statement that calls the incident a “preventable error” and lays out the situation whereby three double-checks of the medication were overlooked before the medication was administered – twice by pharmacy staff and once by nursing. (link) Safety measures required by the hospital were obviously not followed. The Quaids have not filed a lawsuit against Cedars-Sinai at this time.

The Quaids have, however, filed a lawsuit against Baxter Healthcare Corporation, the manufacturer of heparin, citing “unreasonably dangerous” and “negligent” behavior on the part of Baxter, due to the similar appearance of the two different vials of heparin.

The plaintiffs claim that Baxter should have made more effort to clearly label these medications in a different fashion so they would not be confused with one another. The sum requested is $100,000. This is not major bank to a movie star, and so why Baxter? Why not sue Cedars-Sinai for a gajillion bucks since they admitted fault?

From my desk, not far from our own Pyxis machine and pharmacy, I’m trying to see it from both sides. Three sequential errors in medication checks make me wonder about the Cedars-Sinai staff, obviously. double-checks in meds are implemented for a reason. But a little probing unearthed the fact that this is not the first incident in which pediatric patients were mistakenly dosed with high-concentration heparin. It has happened multiple times at multiple hospitals, and everyone has attributed the tendency for human error on to the similar blue labels. So Baxter obviously knows about this.

The Quaids’ lawsuit calls the similar packaging “unreasonably dangerous,” as both labels are on blue fields and obviously don’t have to be, but the charge of negligence points directly to the fact that Baxter has been made aware of the potential for error that has been attributed to the heparin packaging, and yet has not taken measures to recall, repackage, or even issue direct warnings about the dangers of mixing up these vials. Now this last seems a bit silly to me… really, should Tylenol have to warn me not to take this drug if I really mean to take Benadryl? But product recalls are rampant these days, and every manufacturer that hears the word “lead” and his product mentioned in the same sentence is rushing to cover his tail by calling everything back. So after the first error instances were reported some time ago, why didn’t Baxter do anything? They don’t look identical to me, but why not make one label red and one blue just to be on the safe side? This is what the Quaids want to know.

They’re obviously not in it for the money. Cedars-Sinai might be paying them under the table for all we know, but even if they aren’t, it’s easier to blame the big corporation for your troubles than the people who you have met face to face. You know the Quaids have met the nurse who did this. They don’t WANT to blame her. And it’s not that they want to BLAME Baxter either, but they want the company to know that they could have taken steps to prevent this error too… just like Cedars-Sinai staff could have done.

Baxter had a very small part in it. The only reason I would support any ruling in the Quaids’ favor in this lawsuit is because this has happened before, been reported to Baxter, and nothing was changed. No warning was issued. The vials have different shades of blue on the labels and have different color caps, but that’s how it was before. Sure, they could have done SOMETHING. The world (and the Quaids) thinks they should have done something, because we expect everyone to engage in frantic ass-covering in these litigious times.

I don’t think the Quaids want money from Baxter so much as they want action. And I think that the reason they haven’t sued Cedars-Sinai (yet) is because Cedars immediately announced plans to take action. Maybe this is the idealist in me. The Quaids don’t want the money. They want to save the rest of the children.

They’re elbowing for a dinner invite from Brad and Angelina.

I don’t know what kind of person I’m becoming, but it appears to be the kind who sits in a coffee shop and blogs instead of going out and interacting with real people. Of course, some people who do that end up getting a TV show and a spot on Celebrity Rap Superstar. I’m not talking about Kendra Wilkinson.

I picked up a Bill Bryson book today.

Bill Bryson is my favorite writer. If you’ve not experienced any of his delightful books, drop everything and do so immediately. Here, take my car.

I am one of those oddball People Who Read For Fun. In fact, I am in that still odder subset, People Who Read For Fun and Intellectual Betterment. That’s PWRFFIB, which is approximately the sound most people make when puffing out their cheeks and scoffing at me. PWRFF in my demographic (SWF, 20s) tend to believe that Intellectual Betterment is not fun. Books that make you smarter are for school. Fun books are pink and have lively sketches of martini glasses, shopping bags, and/or high heels on the covers. (I confess to a meager stash of these pink books, but I hide them the way most married men hide their porn.) Many PWRFF tend to believe that Fun and Intellectual Betterment are mutually exclusive.

Bill Bryson’s books are fun. They will also make you smarter.

Bill Bryson is a native Iowan who moved to England on a whim at the age of twenty, married an English girl, and raised his family on that lovely island for twenty years before hauling them all across the pond to Hanover, New Hampshire in the mid-nineties. He is neither slick nor erudite, a rather charming amalgam of American small-town simplicity and British droll. The magic in his writing is that despite his many years as a journalist and best-selling author, despite his extensive travel around the globe and his cranium packed with more fact and lore than you or I could ever hope to absorb, Bill Bryson is perpetually wide-eyed, curious, and quite often puzzled. As he seeks to educate himself about his chosen topic, he will inadvertently educate you while you are laughing yourself stupid.

His twenty years in the land of the Queen’s English have given Bryson a few quirks, like an appreciation for scones and milky tea, and a peculiar pickiness about pubs. (Americans just like a place to drink, period. Bonus points if there are TVs and girls present.) And yet despite his insider status in that nation, Britain is just as much a puzzling place to him as the land of his birth. This is what makes Notes From a Small Island a great book. The fact that he had only ever learned to pay taxes, purchase a home, work with a lawyer, and perform other grown-up chores in England made life after his return to America similarly troublesome. This is what makes I’m a Stranger Here Myself a great book. The wilderness is another source of bewilderment. This is what makes A Walk In the Woods one of my favorite books ever. EVER.

Right now I am re-reading (for these are the sorts of books you should re-read) In a Sunburned Country, Bryson’s account of his travels in Australia. In following Bryson’s bumblings and bumping along the Boomerang Coast and the outback, I have been thoroughly entertained and sneakily educated. This is the wily man’s trick: He will lure you in with a humorous anecdote about confused old people on the side of the road and wind up telling you about the history of the Great Western Highway through the Blue Mountains and how the developers could have saved a lot of time and trouble if they’d followed the cows to find the mountain pass. This is how it begins… trivia, history, local lore, and of course, his personal opinions on hotels, urban planning, and the peculiarity of Australian names like Boomahnoomoonah and Tittybong. (These are real places.) Before you know it, you’re searching Expedia for tickets to Mullumbimby instead of Sydney.

Bryson’s observations and research encompass the culture of the places in which he travels, from politics to pastiche, as well as the travel experience itself. Take, for example, this passage from In a Sunburned Country, in which he hears a cricket match on the radio and contemplates the oddities of the game of cricket and its presence in Australia.

No, the mystery of cricket is not that Australians play it well, but that they play it at all. It has always seemed to me a game much too restrained for the rough-and-tumble Australian temperament. Australians much prefer games in which brawny men in scanty clothing bloody each other’s noses. I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket were left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other. And the thing is, it would be a much better game for it.

You now have a much clearer picture of Australia than ever before. This is travel literature at its finest.

Read your first Bill Bryson book (now) and you will have inadvertently become one of the PWRFFIB. You’ll know more useful things about Australia (or England, or the Appalachian Trail, or Africa, or Western Europe*) than any Rough Guide or Lonely Planet book could impart. Don’t tell me you need to know the names of 47 hotels and 32 museums in Melbourne and what days they offer senior discounts. You need to know that representatives from Melbourne and Sydney practically came to blows in 1901 when the nascent Commonwealth of Australia needed to choose a capital city, each believing that his city should be given the honor, resulting in an impasse that led the Parliament to simply build a new city (Canberra) halfway between Melbourne and Sydney in order to keep the peace.

You have probably had some sort of fun while reading this. And you have probably just learned something new**. GOTCHA!

*In a Sunburned Country, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson’s African Diary, and Neither Here Nor There, respectively.

**If you knew all this stuff already, pat yourself on the back and go away.

I don’t want to know what part of chicken the ring comes from. Don’t ask me and don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. If I knew, I might not crave my chicken rings anymore, and then I’d be hitting the Hostess snacks hard.

The chicken ring has a warm place in my heart and in my stomach as the only meat-masquerade product produced by White Castle that my body can tolerate in even small quantity. This point was driven home with acute pain on two occasions: one in my college years, involving the aptly-nicknamed “belly bomber” burger and a lovely view of the inside of my toilet, and the second more recently involving a fish sandwich and the bathroom once again, albeit in a different but no less excruciating manner.

Humankind asserts its dominance as the top beast on the food chain by snacking on those below us. Stories of human children raised with wild animals invariably include accounts of the human’s animal behaviors gleaned from its formative time spent with the animal family. It is my personal theory that their continual proximity to the pseudo-animal product that is the staple of the White Castle menu has made the employees at my local restaurant somehow devolve to adopting pseudo-animal brain function and human interaction skills. This evening’s scenario went something like this:

I walk in. There is no one on either side of the counter. Two girls in a booth by the window are talking quietly. I stand at the counter and notice three people behind it, one young man poking at buttons on a cash register at the drive-thru window and two rotund young ladies plodding back and forth between fries, sandwiches, and liquefied cheese. I try to make eye contact and am studiously avoided.

I politely refrain from drumming my fingers on the counter, coughing loudly or otherwise proclaiming “I am here!” Finally, a woman walks out from the back, elbows her way past one of the girls and presents herself at the register.

“Help you?” she asks, focusing on a point somewhere over my left shoulder. Call me effusive, but I do like when adults speak in complete sentences.

“I’ll have a nine-piece order of chicken rings, fries, and a side of cheese. To go, please.”

She punches buttons, still not looking at me. “Five oh nine,” she declares.

I pull out my debit card and swipe it through the little punch pad in front of me. It beeps angrily. I look up at the cashier and she’s gone back to focusing on the spot above my left shoulder. “Press credit or debit,” she sighs.

Yes, White Castle employee working for petty change, I am a moron. I press the proper button and swipe my card again. The machine prompts me: “Enter Secret Code.” Whaaaat? I assume my pin number might be said secret code, and I dutifully punch it in and confirm the total. I look up and the cashier has disappeared forever and left my receipt on the counter.

I pick it up and I wait, watching the two girls lumber about and pass food to the young man who will not move more than two feet from the drive-thru register. In the time I spent waiting for my chicken rings, there was nothing to do but listen.

“Help you?” the drive-thru man asked. This was the standard greeting, it seemed. There was a kerfuffle on the other end of the speaker.

“I want a twelve-pack of cheeseburgers and three things of fries and… no wait, I want the meal thing, I want three number ones with cheese on the burgers except on four and I want no onions on any of them…no wait, okay put onions on three of the burgers but not the ones with cheese. And a large Diet Coke.”

I couldn’t help but snicker a little bit. I tried a companionable smile on one of the counter girls. She raised an eyebrow at me and frowned. “It’s just funny, you know?” I said. “I mean, I used to work drive-thru and…” I trailed off as she turned around and began counting my chicken rings into a box. She tucked them into a bag with the fries and one small container of cheese.

“Could I have some more cheese, please?” I asked.

She raised her eyebrow again. “You want MORE cheese?” she repeated stupidly, holding the bag.

“Yes,” I said. She stared at me blankly. “It’s just that it’s a little cup of cheese, and you know that at McDonald’s they give you more sweet and sour sauce when you get nine McNuggets than you get with six and I thought – “

The other counter girl cut me off. “You want sweet and sour sauce?”

“No, I – “

“You want more cheese it’ll be twenty-five cents,” interjected the first one.

“No more cheese then,” I broke in. Damned if I was going to debit twenty-five cents, and as anyone who knows me can tell you, I never carry a red cent. Or a silver quarter.

“I don’t think we HAVE sweet and sour sauce,” continued the second girl, rooting around in a bin under the counter.

“I don’t WANT sweet and sour sauce!” I said, grabbing for my bag, which was still in the greasy clutches of the first girl. She almost fought me for it, but I yanked it away and clutched my chicken rings to my chest.

“Then why did you say you wanted – “

“I didn’t say I wanted it,” I snapped. “I was giving you an example of what Mc – oh dear God, never mind.” I had to leave; I could actually hear them rolling their eyes as I walked out.

At the end of the day, I still don’t understand why I crave chicken rings. I’m sitting here with a half-empty beer, staring at one chicken ring and a gluey tub of cheese and I wonder: if White Castle can keep its customers with employees like that running their franchises, then I don’t suppose it would be any more off-putting to let the millions of people who want What You Crave know what they put in their chicken rings.

I’m in a coffee shop. There’s not much to do in a coffee shop besides tap away at one’s computer and look pensive. I can do both at once so I’m showing off to you.

I have another job now. I have some rather naughty spending habits, so to supplement the meat-and-potatoes paycheck from DMH, I decided to put my service excellence skills to good use and become a waitress a few evenings a week.

I have never been a waitress. The ad on Craigslist asked for servers with experience. I applied anyway and was still asked to come and interview. The small talk with the owner was easy – we were both dressed quite cute and had much to say on that matter before anyone said anything about working. She asked about school, my “real job,” etc. before finally taking a look down the page and noticing my novice status. (Although I didn’t know it at the time, this failure to notice important details was, in fact, a harbinger of doom.)

“Ah,” Andrea said, pursing her lips. “I see you don’t have any food service experience.”

“I worked at Lion’s Choice for a few months in high school,” I offered helpfully.

“I meant as a server, I guess.”

“I have a lot of service experience, though,” I pointed out. “It just doesn’t involve hefting a tray.”

“It says here you were a secretary, but I think we’re looking for more interaction with customers,” she said, indicating the first job I held at BGH four years ago.

I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but lady, you have no idea, I thought. I took my deep breath. “I was a secretary for a surgical unit that cared for post-op cancer patients. Every day, I dealt with patients and families who were upset, scared, hurting, and angry at the most vulnerable times of their lives. I held a mom’s hand while her son was brought back from cardiac arrest. I brought DVDs from home to the 18 year old girl who had 4 surgeries in 4 weeks. And I figure that if I can help those people every day, in addition to running a unit’s medical records and staffing, I can handle a drunk guy who doesn’t like his pasta.”

Beat. Andrea looks down at her paper and makes a scribble. “Can you start training tomorrow night?”

The real point of the story is that the next night I met the cute head chef. I dropped silverware and he laughed at me and I mouthed off to him and we’re in a blissful state of happy together now.