Right now I'm clenching my teeth, trying to cool off from the day of seeing our patients.

This morning, a hygiene patient, who is scheduled for the works with our hygienist for one hour, walks in and informs us that she thinks her insurance might not pay because she is too early. Geez, she just figured this out this MORNING?!? One hour wasted. One hour of hygiene production, grand total = 0. Worse, one hour of paying the hygienist her salary. She isn't on commission, she gets paid hourly whether the patients show up or not.

So I go to lunch after nothing really going the way it was supposed to go this morning, and come back, and my 2:30 isn't here. He never did show. No call. Nothing. 45 minutes of no production for me. Yet I get to pay my assistant and two front desk workers for that time. And we had confirmed the appointment yesterday, and spoken to a human being (as opposed to leaving a message on an answering machine, which apparently no one ever listens to, or always get erased before the intended recipient hears it or some other excuse).

So: 5 pm rolls around. Now, mind you, I can't get anyone in for over a month for an after 5pm appointment. So what happens? First my 6 o'clock cancels. Stuck at work, he says. Then my 5 o'clock cancels. Stuck at work, he says. (I didn't mistype it...they were the exact same two excuses.) Now, I had a couple of quick emergencies stuck in there, but that just wasn't the same. I've got people wanting these late appointments, and at 2:30/3:00 in the afternoon, it's FAR too late to try to get any of those people in. (Next week I had to take off one of our late nights for my son's preschool graduation - I could have moved one of those patients to tonight.) Again, I get to pay my dental assistant and my two front desk people. The hygienist was still seeing patients, and I had those two little "emergencies" (not really emergencies in the sense that they have a broken tooth or pain), so everyone had to stick around.

I actually probably lost money "working" today. I probably paid out more in salaries than I produced.

Days like this, I just want to retire. I'm only 47, so of course I can't, but days like this make me want to switch careers. Man do these people piss me off!

Well, tomorrow's another day (and another late night) and maybe it will be better than today. Can't be much worse...