Bruises, Bureaucracy and Fruit

Just a few short notes:

 

1. The sahuni (shop lady) at the shop near my house, which is really just a window into her house that people buy stuff from, sold me a 20L bottle of water based on the trust method.  Mainly because she couldn't (or wouldn't) break my 1000 rupee note. This means one of may things:
a) I am super trustworthy and will come back with 80 rupees when I have it
b) everyone in the neighbourhood knows me and is keeping better tabs on me than the CIA
c) she didn't want to lose my water business to the big department store 20m away - which i was heading towards..
d) she just didn't want to break my 1000 rupee note

 

2. If bureaucracy is strangling Australia, it is snapping the neck of Nepal.  I want to make a very small change that will probably seem insignificant and petty to you, but will make the lives of at least 20 staff members a bucketload easier.  Every patient has a registration date (date they first come here), a visit date (the supposed date of this particular visit) and a bill date (the supposed date they paid the bill).  Its pretty simple.  I want them to record the day that the patient visits in the Visit Date field and the date they paid the bill in the Bill Date field rather than abstract dates made up in the corner of the mind of some guy sitting in the corner.  This will apparently cause issues for Accounting (that's what I expected, that would happen at home too), but when I suggested going to Accounting to discuss the issue with them, I was told "no, we cannot do that.  They are senior to me, I don't have enough authority to talk to them."

 

"OOOOOOOOOOOkay, who does have enough authority to talk to them?"

 

"Mr X does"

 

"But Mr X is the person that told us we have to talk to Accounting"

 

"Yes, but he didn't give us permission to go."

 

"We only want to ask them a simple question"

 

[mini teary approaching] "I don't have authority to speak directly with them.."  URGGH

 

3. In other news, suppose you have 100 apples, and you are doing a study on them.  40 of them have worms, 60 have no worms but do have a deformity.  Both wormed and deformed apples may have bruising, high intra-appular pressure or a glycaemic imbalance, or not, or any mixture of the above. 

 

Even if 35 of the wormed apples and 59 of the deformed apples have bruising, it is a fallacy to say that bruising or those other diseases is a cause of both worms and deformity in all fruit, because you don't have any bananas, oranges, kiwi fruit or ringos to compare them to, just apples.  If you wanted to make a claim for all fruit, then you would have had to include other fruits in your study.  Hard enough as it was for you to read that, imagine explaining it with humans, eyes a language barrier and 5 minutes (which is the amount of time I get with the doctor doing this study on "fruit" each day).

 

Although I am going insane, remember that when I was sane, I loved you all.