in the eye of the beholder

One of my job responsibilities is to do mental health screenings on many of the 300+ children in foster care in the Queens region of the agency. This means that all the kids are seen by me, our psychologist or one of the interns, and we ask the children or their foster parents, depending on their age, a bunch of questions from a questionnaire to see how things are going in the foster home. If we are even one day late doing the screening, we don't get credit when audit time comes around, so I have to keep track of who is seen and when and make sure they are all seen within the year.

One of our kids was scheduled to be in for a medical appointment and was also supposed to see me afterwards. But I didn't see him for what ever reason. Our secretary kept telling me that I did see him on July 20, and although I am a total slacker, I do keep track of who I do and do not see. I have a very complicated system which involves a list of names on a Post-it. Once I see the kid, I write his/her name on a Post-it. It may stay on that Post-it for a day, a week, or whatever, until I get around to writing up the report. While it's waiting to be written, the questionnaire and all my notes on the child sit in a pile. Once I write up my report, I save it on my computer, and then cross the name off the Post-it list, and then put my notes in a different pile. It's very technical, don't try to understand it.

Anyway, this child's name was not on my Post-it, no notes were in either pile and no report was saved on my computer, which means this child was NOT seen by me in 2011.

But the secretary kept telling me I did it, and I am telling her I did not do it, so she tries to get to the bottom of it by calling the foster mother. The foster mother said that the screening was done by a "young woman with long brown hair." Everyone immediately says, "OH, that means Mary did it." Mary is a young woman who was an intern with us this year, and she indeed has brown hair. But my immediate reaction was to make a silly joke and say, "What?? I have brown hair too. Are you saying I'm not young?" They all laugh, and of course, now that they have a description, realize that I was right all along and that I did not do the screening because young Mary did it. So they start to figure out how they are going to get the information from Mary, whose internship ended a month ago.

I figure out it can't be Mary because Mary only worked on Fridays and this screening was supposedly done on a Wednesday. So the next thought was, "It must have been Melanie." Melanie is a young woman with brown hair who used to work in our office, quit last year, moved to London, didn't like it and moved back and then started working at my agency on a volunteer basis on Wednesdays. When this discussion happened, she was on vacation in Greece. My supervisor tells me to email Melanie because she will surely read her email while in Greece and we can finally put this mystery to rest. However, I'm 99.99% positive that Melanie did not do this screening and I'm not even going to bother emailing her because I have already figured out who did the screening and that was NO ONE and the foster mother does not remember that I did the screening, not on July 20, but in February on a different child.

So even though she does not believe me, the medical secretary reschedules the screening for today. And even though the foster mother believes it was done already, she agrees to come back with the boy.

When they arrive, she takes a look at me, says, "Didn't we already do this? I know I was just here and we sat in this office." I said, "Yes, you did, but that was six months ago and that was for the older sister." She thinks for a minute and finally agrees that I am right.

The moral of this story is I AM THE YOUNG WOMAN!!