driving through the shadow of death

Paperwork is more than a job when you are a long term caregiver. As paperwork is more than a job for the bureaucracy of facilities and organizations involved in long term care.

Someone got a creative and efficient idea in their head for these economic times and decided to try assigning long term care renewal paperwork to the more underpopulated and theroretically less overworked offices.  

I have no problem with creative efficiency in bureaucracy. Overworked is only a proven formula for mistakes.  

I embrace new ways with guarded optimism. There is a part of me that can never quite shake a conspiracy theory that jumping through all the hoops, dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s are some kind of litmus test rather than need.  

With all that being said and discovering the newly assigned office had neither email nor voice mail, I was not about to entrust the renewal paperwork to the mail.

And so I headed out on what became an over three hour round trip drive through mountains and up and down others.

Let me tell you - there is nothing quite like driving through the ‘shadow of death’ not once but twice…

Forget my original concern about email and voice mail,  I began to wonder if there were even cars …

Maybe I'm just a tourist at heart, but a tractor parked on top of a boulder in the middle of nowhere - now, that's a photo opportunity ... 

Yet most amazing of all when I delivered the paperwork - the clerk said “thank you”. I am still trying to remember when, if ever, anyone has ever said ‘thank you’ when I handed them a batch of paperwork.

Caregivingly Yours, Patrick Leer 

web site: caregivinglyyours.com  

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