Sometimes I just hate being a laboratorian. Today I had to call a physician's office in Illinois to clarify orders on a patient. I got transferred to the clinic lab and described my problem. My counterpart in their lab looked it up in the tests directory and said, referring off the computer screen, "Yeah, yeah, I ordered HLA antibody anal... anali... analis." And from that point on, she referred to the "HLA antibody analysis" as the "HLA antibody analis". At first I let it go as a slip. But then I realized she didn't know how to pronounce the word at all. She said the word analis over and over again throughout our conversation; each time, I just wanted to shout, "No, it's ANALYSIS!!" I refrained from doing so because I think, judging by how the rest of the conversation went, I would have irrevocably confused her. Even though I felt I had been using questions simple enough for a drunken kindergartner to understand, all I could get from her was an Ebonics-tinged string of sentence fragments that held no pertinent information. (My problem was to try to figure out why she ordered this test not determine whether it had been ordered.) Eventually I gave up and spoke directly to the ordering physician who, even though she did not know much about the subject matter, was at least capable of stringing words together into coherent sentences. So why do I hate being a laboratorian? Because it's this type of people that labs invariably hire to answer the phones and make laboratory people sound like total retards. I suppose compared to functioning under the assumption of retardedness (thanks to that great reputation we've established), the endless repetitive work seems like the attractive part of the job.