Jobness!

I figured I owed people an explanation about my new job. Enough people have asked that I thought maybe I could get it all out in one fell swoop. So!

I got a call from my temp agency - which is apparently not a "temp" agency so much anymore but a perm-to-hire and/or direct-placement agency - about a job with a pathologist. At least, that's what I thought they said. Turned out to be for a lab that specializes in pathology-type stuffs. We'll get to that. Had a phone interview that went swimmingly, joking with the interviewer and relating on multiple levels, vetching about the dryness of Milton and sympathizing on generation gaps. At the end of it, he said I was one of the "5% of people who are fun to interview on the phone", and gave me a bunch of his contact info. A few days later I had a face-to-face interview, during which I got to be pround of my obessive need for organization and talk about obscure medical facts I learned from my dad and fiance. Eyebrows were raised in surprise. They complimented me a lot. We struck up conversations and had a blast. A few days later I was hired... for %25 more pay than I have EVER earned.

Things have settled in, but nothing is ever exactly the same each day. I've got a routine, sort of, since I need to basically get all the phone calls done by a certain point in the day in order to make contact with the vast majority of our clients, who are on the East Coast. The rest of the day is data entry... or, maybe it's copying. Faxing? No, filing. How about going through that old box of charts and finding out what the heck they were pulled for? Sure, boss, I can do that. And pull these charts: we need to ask for ICD codes. No problem. When you're done there, can you check with the lead scientist-doctor-lady to see where she's at with reviewing results? Don't forget to mark those charts as QNS. Oh hey, what have we here...

It's never dull. Things are always moving, and the system is malleable, evolving. The company is growing - and fast - so we're having to adapt and fill in gaps we didn't even know we had until someone asked, "hey, what about this?". The people here are awesome: smart, quick-witted, funny, educated, friendly, relaxed, and laid back without a hint of laziness. Everyone here is on top of their game. It's a hive of activity, with all the little bees bustling about their business to get the work done.

And the work is...

I would say glorious, but there is no glory here. Only what must be done, what SHOULD be done. Honor, perhaps. Thinking about it on the ride to work this morning, it occurred to me that I am part of the war on cancer.

The lab has two functions: cancer research, and cancer identification. The researchers research. It's what they do. The rest of us let them work, their brows furrowed in concentration as they work to perfect the test we use to identify cancer types. The rest of us test samples, identifying tumors for sources of cancer: this is based in the liver, this one in the stomach, this one in the lungs.

This is not what I do personally, but I am an integral part in making the process work. If there is in fact a "War on Cancer", the patient is the front line. They are the battleground AND the militia, the contested and the defense. The Oncologist is the General, the Pathologist his Strategist, both planning and ordering the best way to identify and counter the attacks. The labs are the arms manufacturers - creating the weapons to be used best on the battle ground - and the intelligence centers - cracking the codes, collecting information, and identifying the enemy. Our lab is of the latter kind. We take a sample of the tissue, when the doctors come up clueless as to where the origin of the cancer resides, and we run it against an enormous database of tumor samples to identify the type of cancer we're dealing with. Our accuracy is incredible.

We are the people in the back lines, in the little tent in the rear-base, listening in on the enemy's communications and triangulating their whereabouts. We find their base, so that the surgical strike-team can go in and attack the cancer directly, limiting the damage to the patient's system.

What we do is crucial.

And even though I'm far removed from the front line, even though I'm as far back in that little back tent as you can get, what I do is still very important to the process, and because of me the lab can run smoothly, swiftly cranking out accurate results to Oncologists so that the patient can get the right treatment that much faster.

THAT is my new job. And I am DAMN proud of it.