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Moving along smoothly...
Dec. 9th, 2005 10:51 amWhile on the one hand, NASA suffers from many of the ills of any large, bureaucratic organization, there are times when folks - particularly down at the level where the "rubber meets the road" - just hunker down and do what has to be done with a minimum of fuss, and that suits me just fine.
Do you want technical information? If there are any complaints in that department, they might tend toward the side of being given too much of the stuff. At any rate, NASA is one of the few organizations that - deep down in its bones - really doesn't understand the idea of a "stupid" question.
Then there are the medical staff, whose thankless job it is to make sure that - at the end of the day - everyone goes home with a reasonable chance of showing back up again the next day.
This morning, as I was being led off to start the process of taking the flight controller's physical with a urine sample (to be immediately followed with a blood draw), I inadvertently let the folks at the space medicine clinic know (with my hearty "Good afternoon!" booming out at 7:30 am) that I'd been on console since the night before, which caused the nurse on duty to make a snap decision to move the major part of my physical - scheduled for about 1 pm - to immediately-right-now.
"It makes no sense," she said with a note of steel in her voice, "for you to have to come back this afternoon." I was in no mood to argue.
Of the items I caught in media res was a slight deterioration in the high-frequency response of my left ear, which is slightly counterbalanced by a loss of 4 kg (8.8 lb) of body weight since the last time I had such a physical. I will get the complete skinny during the second half of the process, which is scheduled for sometime next week.
Cheers...
Do you want technical information? If there are any complaints in that department, they might tend toward the side of being given too much of the stuff. At any rate, NASA is one of the few organizations that - deep down in its bones - really doesn't understand the idea of a "stupid" question.
Then there are the medical staff, whose thankless job it is to make sure that - at the end of the day - everyone goes home with a reasonable chance of showing back up again the next day.
This morning, as I was being led off to start the process of taking the flight controller's physical with a urine sample (to be immediately followed with a blood draw), I inadvertently let the folks at the space medicine clinic know (with my hearty "Good afternoon!" booming out at 7:30 am) that I'd been on console since the night before, which caused the nurse on duty to make a snap decision to move the major part of my physical - scheduled for about 1 pm - to immediately-right-now.
"It makes no sense," she said with a note of steel in her voice, "for you to have to come back this afternoon." I was in no mood to argue.
Of the items I caught in media res was a slight deterioration in the high-frequency response of my left ear, which is slightly counterbalanced by a loss of 4 kg (8.8 lb) of body weight since the last time I had such a physical. I will get the complete skinny during the second half of the process, which is scheduled for sometime next week.
Cheers...
