Family Matters

About a week ago, Jeffrey got a special delivery from Grandmother. He absolutely LOVES Lands' End Clothes, so she sent him a handsome blue dress shirt, an adorable navy tie with seahorses on it, and some cuff links. He was so excited, and I say that it looks amazing with a white doctor's coat. (Then again, I look great with a white coat, too...white coats are the new black at our house.)



My family came to visit this week because everyone had Spring Break (including Jeffrey) except for me. The dental school's Spring Break isn't until the end of March and beginning of April. For some reason the dental school's break and the medical school's break were different this year. I had begun to suspect that the school's administrators had not been considering our personal schedules when making the academic calendar, but now I'm sure they are ignoring our individual preferences. How rude.

Anyway, we had a great time visiting with my family, and in true Robert and Jenny style, they brought us food, bought us clothes, paid for our meals, and took us grocery shopping. They're so sweet!

One of the funnier things that happened during the week was our dinner at Macaroni Grill. Mom mentioned that she had seen a sweet little three week old baby last week. My brother, Greg, was with her when she saw the baby, and told us how small and fragile the newborn looked to him by saying, "It was so tiny, I could have crushed its skull."

???????????????????

Do not allow my brother to hold your newborn--this has been a public service announcement.

A little bit after the extremely strange newborn comment that my brother made, all the lights went off in the restaurant. They came back on shortly thereafter, but it made me think of how many strange things have happened to me since I started this blog. It's almost as if the universe wants us to have material for this little computer journal. Honestly, how many of you can say that you've 1)seen someone clipping his fingernails during a church service 2)had all the lights go out in a restaurant where you were eating 3)have seen your professors pants fall down during class?!

As a side story, I have yet another dental school woe to share with you. It requires a bit of boring explanation--hang in there...

In dental school, we use a tool called an articulator. This is kind of what one looks like. Articulators mimic the movements of a patient's mouth so that the dentist can work on a crown or some other device without the patient actually being present. In order for this to work, the articulator has to have many adjustable parts so that it can work for lots of different patients. This year, our school bought us new articulators.

Twenty minutes later, most of them broke. Just kidding. Seriously, though, about 20% of them had some part broken very quickly and 40% of them had some malfunctioning part that wasn't necessarily broken, but was incorrect in some minor way. Because of these problems, the articulator company sent some representatives to fix them. When the representatives came, they tried to fix the aforementioned 60% and double check the properly functioning 40%. Instead, they broke all but 2 of them. Lovely.

Anyway, mine had a part that should unscrew to move a table to different heights and then screw back in to hold the table there. Instead, when I unscrewed it, several pieces would fall off of the device and the table would collapse. I took it to the representatives, and this is what happened:

Me: Hi, my incisal guide table keeps falling apart when I try to adjust it. This pin here keeps falling out.
Representative: Ok, we didn't know about that before we got here.
Me: Ok. Do you think you can fix it? I really need it for a project we're doing today.
Rep: No. We didn't know about that problem before we got here.
Me: Oh...sorry. We were told you guys were coming to fix any problems we had.
Rep: Yeah, that's why we're here.
Me: Ok, but you can't fix this problem?
Rep: No.
Me: Is there a quick-fix that we could do today so that it will hold for a week? I really have to have it working for that project.
Rep: We can try.

Lots of time passes.

Me: Is it fixed?
Rep: No.

More time passes.

Me: Is it ready?
Rep: You can take it. We're pretty sure it won't fall apart as long as you hold it on this pressure point while you move it. It was falling apart because you were adjusting it too much.
Me: It was my fault for adjusting the adjustable part...?
Rep: Yes.