A Call to Action!

A while back my buddy Ambulance Driver wrote a fantastic rant about the twatsiclery at a shop he took his motorcycle to for some work - Cycles & More of Southern Louisiana. The long & the short of it is, these asshats wouldn't know customer service if it came up and bit them on the ass. For quite some time this rant of rants was the number one Google hit for a search of Cycles & More. Well it seems as though this ranking has slipped and so we must do what we can to return AD's rant to its proper place. So if you have a blog of your own, go ahead and do him a favor and link Cycles & More to AD's article found here.

WTF. Over.

Okay, so I was rolling through my Site Meter statistics this morning before heading in to work and I noticed that someone got to my blog via the "50 Best Blogs for Male Nurses" post at www.lpn-to-rn.net Now, I don't take issue with being linked from them- we all know I'm whore for links. I'm flattered that they have me as #3 on the list, what I do take issue with is the tag line they've assigned me - "Medic Matthew talks about working with nurses, doctors and other people who don’t give him enough credit." I. Call. Bullshit. Now I'm not about to go back through my entire archive, but I'm quite certain that this is not a "Woe is me, Nurses/Doctors/PA's/NP's/RRT's/Rad Techs/Phlebotomists hate me" blog. I have never taken that attitude and anyone who knows me knows that (to quote my friend Ryan)- bitches love me because they know I can rock. I am well respected among my peers and among the hospital staff that I interact with on a daily basis.

So, can anyone explain to me wtf that tag line is all about?

While we're on the subject

I mentioned it in that last post and so I have to come clean here. I, MedicMatthew, am a Vicious Circle fanboy. I listen to it during my commute to work, it makes me laugh. I often agree with what a lot of the participants have to say. I've met JayG. I have also met  Weer'd Beard and find myself wanting to comment about some of the things he says about Maine. I think it would be a fucking riot to just sit back at a bar and listen to Stingray go off on a rant. I'm quite certain that I would have a complete fanboy meltdown if I some day met Breda. Oh and Alan & Jim and LabRat would be pretty awesome to have a beer with too!

So there it is. It feels so good to be out of the closet.

Monkeyspheres

Earlier this evening I was lamenting the fact that my muse has apparently up and left me. I realize that I don’t post regularly and it has been quite some time since I sat down and made a list of topics to blog about. Hell it was while I was living in Pennsylvania so it was probably about two years ago that I sat down and made my first ABC’s of Blogging list- a blog topic for each letter of the alphabet. It was a good way to come up with a list of things to blog about and it worked for a while. I should do it again, but I digress. I was bitching to my friend Sean via AIM about how I had nothing to blog about and his suggestion was “write about me….and how I’ve changed ur life” and I got to thinking about my friends.

I am a devoted listener of the Vicious Circle Podcast . On last week’s episode the topic of the Monkeysphere   came up- the gist of it being that humans are capable of maintaining about 150 relationships, beyond that things start to get a bit squiffy and we stop caring

The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number much larger than 150.

……

Oh, not much. It's just the one single reason society doesn't work.

It's like this: which would upset you more, your best friend dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck hauling killer bees? Which would hit you harder, your Mom dying, or seeing on the news that 15,000 people died in an earthquake in Iran?

They're all humans and they are all equally dead. But the closer to our Monkeysphere they are, the more it means to us. Just as your death won't mean anything to the Chinese or, for that matter, hardly anyone else more than 100 feet or so from where you're sitting right now.

The moral of the story is that after about 150 people or so we kinda stop caring. Person #151 is outside of our monkey sphere and we just don’t have room in our brains to maintain that relationship and so we either vote someone else off the island to make room for a new one or we just give person #151 a bored ‘meh’ and move on.



I have many “friends” on Facebook, but a good number of them are outside of my Monkeysphere. Sean, luckily for him, happens to fall within my Monkeysphere. It didn’t take too terribly long to earn a spot there and I don’t know whom I may have cast out to make room for him, but he is there nonetheless. I can count on my ten fingers the number of true friends that I have. I’m talking help-you-bury-a-body-and-burn-the-evidence friends and he is definitely one of them. I think a lot of times we take those friends for granted and assume that they know how we feel about them so perhaps I should make a more concerted effort to let my friends know how I feel about them. Perhaps I should tell them how much I value them and how I really do cherish their friendship. On second thought, given the way my friends and I talk to each other and rib one another they’d probably think something was wrong.

I'm still here.

Wow, it has been two months since I last posted. Not a whole lot to report here so I thought I'd share a link to a local story.

People ask me why I carry a concealed handgun. This is why