The accidental receptionist

I remember when I was a house officer in the infamous ward, Ward P2, at the Kuala Lumpur General Hospital (KLGH), how I used to dread sitting at the registration table (we didn’t have a counter then), in the wee hours of the morning, when all was quiet in the ward (typically there would be between 50-65 patients in the ward at any one time), when all the blood investigations have been taken, all the results have been traced – there I would be, sitting at the table and because I found it hard to sleep whenever I am on-call (it’s pointless anyway, since 9.9 out of 10 times, my sleep would be disrupted before I could even achieve REM sleep); trying to finish writing the mountain-high load of pending case-summaries.

Those days we did not have to give a copy of the case summary to the patient upon discharge, so work tend to pile up if one is not consciously trying to finish off all the case summaries assigned to all the junior doctors by a very stern Ward Sister. I remember burning the midnight oil with a fellow HO helping him to finish writing his backlog of care summaries. We finished writing 465 case summaries at around 5 am after 7 hours of slogging! If he didn’t complete them, he would be  barred from moving to another department! (Dr Yong, you owe me one!)

Anyway,I digress. My pet peeve while writing the case summaries at the table was the very annoying and disruptive phone calls.  At that time of those morning,phone calls were few and far in between and more often than not the caller would be either a testosterone-laden amorous suitor or boyfriend of one of the many young nurses working the night shift in the ward, probably seeking some kind of nocturnal (verbal) intercourse.

And since most people I’ve worked with in the hospital had an inborn incapability to pick up the phone (Don’t believe me? Try calling the receptionist in ANY government hospital and count the rings before the phone gets answered – if at all!), and I happened to be sitting at the registration table where the only phone in the ward was placed (there wasn’t anywhere else I could sit actually), inevitably I would be the person who picked up the phone. Usually the conversation would go like this: (translated from Malay)

Me: Hello, Ward P2, can I help you?

Caller: Can I speak to Staff Nurse So-and-so?

Me: (after asking for Staff Nurse So-and-so and discovering she was nowhere to be found) She is not here.

Caller: Ok, thank you.

Call ended.

And if you thought that was the end of it, you are wrong.

The same persistent pest guy would call, again and again at regular intervals throughout the night – or at least until he got to speak with this Staff Nurse So-and-so!

When you are trying to finish some work and the phone keeps ringing off its hook every few minutes or so, it could really try one’s patience.

Until, one day, I discovered a trick that effectively caused these amorous phone calls to cease while I was working at the table. When the phone rang, and before the caller had a chance to complete his first sentence, I would bellow into the mouthpiece of my phone in a sort of sing-song jingle, this sentence:

HELLO SIR! THIS IS PIZZA HUT! CAN I TAKE YOUR ORDER?!!!

Not unexpectedly, there would be an awkward silence at the other end of the phone after which the call would be terminated!

A second call by the same person would receive a similar response from me! (ad infinitum)

Usually the calls did not go beyond twice before stopping altogether and the world’s all good and peaceful again.

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