I was fired from my first job for being too
sincere.
This is likely to be a somewhat puzzling
statement, so let me explain.
My first job after graduating from dental
college was as a staff dentist at the Ramakrishna Mission Polyclinic (the Ramakrishna
Mission is a Hindu monastic order with a presence in numerous countries) in
this town. I was the second dentist – the first was someone I’ll call Sam, a
former classmate of mine (though never a friend) from school who’d gone to some
fifth-grade dental college in Bihar and who was hardly interested in his job.
He was, and I’m not making this up, incapable of distinguishing between a
deciduous and permanent molar tooth; I’ve watched him extract the second under
the impression that it was the first. I’ve watched him grind up an antibiotic
tablet and put it in an infected tooth in the name of treating it. No, I am not
making any of this up. And it was significant because there was only one dental
chair and I had to wait for my turn after he finished his specimens (including
chatting to his friends who turned up to gossip in the guise of getting
treated).
He was also appallingly lazy, unwilling to
work, and – as I discovered later – actively trying to get me fired. The monk
in charge at the time was someone I’ll call Soumrajyananda (that was not his
real name – all Ramakrishna Mission monks take names ending in –nanda after the
take their vows – but nor was it the name under which he was known).
Soumrajyananda was a nice guy, relatively speaking; also one of the last of the
well-qualified monks, computer-literate (something of a rarity at the time),
qualified to drive a medium-sized truck, and with at least a working knowledge
of construction. He also had little tolerance for bullshit, so he didn’t give
any credence to Sam.
Sam finally got himself fired after
insulting the Ramakrishna Mission in front of a specimen who he didn’t know was
a devotee of the Ramakrishna Mission, and after that I was in sole charge of
the clinic; which was something of a mixed blessing, even if it did free me
from Sam. It was a mixed blessing because it wasn’t at all easy to do the work
I was supposed to do.
At that time (I’m talking about the
mid—nineties) the dental clinic was new and, to put it mildly, primitive. How
primitive? Let’s say that as a student, I was using more sophisticated
equipment. (Fellow dentists will know what I’m talking about when I say that
the chair had a cord-driven latch-type handpiece, no suction, no three-way
syringe, and no light-cure unit or ultrasonic scaler.) I didn’t even have an
assistant; during the course of treatment I had to mix filling materials and
between specimens I had to clean and sterilise the instruments by myself –
quite apart from the paperwork.
Ah, yes, there was the paperwork. I had two
registers, one (which I had to demand before I got it – apparently they
expected me to keep the details in my head) for appointments; the other one was
for a daily accounting of specimens by name, age, sex and treatment done. At
the end of every month I was expected to make out and submit a report which broke
down the specimens by sex, treatment, repeat appointments, new appointments and
so on. I never could find the reason for this report since it never seemed to
make any difference about the way they handled the clinic.
This was the procedure for handling a
specimen (it’s significant because it had a direct effect on how I ended up
being fired). A specimen would come to the registration desk, and buy a
treatment card. He or she would then (according to his or her own description
of which kind of doctor he or she wanted to visit) be directed to one or other
of the various physicians, homoeopaths, the dentists – only I after Sam was
sacked until, as I’ll describe, two more were appointed later – the radiology
clinic, or whatever. Suppose a specimen came to me, and needed a filling. I’d
have to – after entering the details in the register – make out a requisition
slip for a filling. The specimen would go back to the reception desk and pay
the fee for the filling, then return to me, and show me the receipt; only after
that was I able to do the filling. It was the same for every bit of treatment.
If I ran out of, say, anaesthetic or filling material, I’d have to go to the
office and ask for more. As the number of specimens increased, obviously, these
trips became more and more frequent.
You can understand that this was hardly the
most efficient way of doing things. It worked OK in the beginning because there
were hardly any specimens, but after Sam left and I began working as I thought
someone in my position should work, the specimen count began shooting up and up
and up. In the beginning there were maybe five specimens a day, and I’d read a
novel in between. Within a year I was handling twenty to thirty, including
surgeries and root canal work – and all of it, one hundred per cent, alone.
Now, by “day” I mean “eight am to twelve
noon”. Those were the official working hours, six days a week; but since, as I
said, I was working far beyond my capacity to comfortably handle specimens I
used to find myself still hard at work at two in the afternoon. Most of the
time I was so exhausted that after work was over I’d just sit and rest for half
an hour before the four-kilometre walk home. I was walking home because I
couldn’t afford any personal transport; there was no bus which went more than
halfway, either. I was being paid, for all that work, two thousand rupees a
month. By comparison, now I earn more than that in a single day, and even then
it isn’t enough. And since many of these specimens couldn’t come later in the
day, and they all wanted appointments in the morning before going to work, I
ended up going to the clinic by seven in the morning so I could sterilise all
the instruments, get everything ready, and start working on them by half past
seven or a quarter to eight. I’d usually have to leave home by six-thirty.
I said the equipment was primitive. It was
so primitive that I ended up bringing some of my own instruments so I could
work more efficiently; and I lost all of this equipment when the clinic burned
down.
What? Oh, yeah, some months after Sam was
sacked the clinic burned down one night, after an electric fire. The electric
wiring was too shoddy to have circuit breakers, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise.
The entire building had to be reconstructed; I helped in raising funds to pay
for that reconstruction. The upside was that I got a slightly more modern dental chair (dentists: one with a compressor
and an airotor handpiece, but still no
scaler or light cure unit). Soon the new clinic was busier than ever.
Then another dentist – let’s call him
Sharad – was employed to “help me”. In practice, this meant that he hindered me
more than anything, because there was just the one chair, and we had to take it
in turns to do the work, while the reception desk took the opportunity to
increase the number of specimens because there were now “two of us”. I found
myself coming earlier than ever, and leaving later.
During these days I had other interactions
with the Mission people. I helped them to set up a vermiculture unit, and I
went out with them on occasion to the villages to conduct dental health camps.
Also, I remember paying for a couple of specimens’ treatment since they couldn’t
afford it. They never paid me back, either.
Around this time, Soumrajyananda was
transferred elsewhere and was replaced by someone I’ll call Bandarananda (from Bandar, monkey; privately I used to call
him the Monkey Monk). This creature had neither the faintest idea of
administration nor anything by way of ability. Nor did he even have the
faintest idea how to behave.
Things rapidly went from bad to worse under
Bandarananda. We still had only one chair, but now there were three dentists – three of us competing
for that one chair. As the one who had the largest number of specimens,
obviously, I had the greatest problems. And there was not the slightest hope of
making the Monkey Monk understand this.
I’d said before that each time we ran out
of material we’d have to go and ask for a replacement. Bandarananda decided we
were using too much, for reasons of his own, so he decided that we should have
only say one bottle of anaesthetic at any given moment in the clinic. Once that
was over, we’d have to go and ask for more.
And since we were seeing twenty or thirty specimens a day in the clinic, the anaesthetic, and gloves, and all other materials got exhausted at an extraordinarily rapid pace. Usually, I had to make a couple of trips to the office each day to ask for replacements. I don’t know what Bandarananda thought about it, but I strongly suspect that he decided I was stealing the materials from the clinic. He was that kind. In any case, I kept on having to prove that I needed more material before he’d, very reluctantly, give it to me.
During this time there were other things
happening in my life. For one, my dad was in the process of dying of cancer,
and I got occasional telephone calls at work to update me on his condition.
Also, I was preparing to set up my own private clinic, and Bandarananda was
well aware that I’d be leaving eventually. I still believe that this was at
least partially responsible for what happened.
One morning I arrived at work, as usual, at
about 7 in the morning, to find that the dental clinic was locked. The guy in
charge of unlocking the building (an assistant in the pathology lab) told me
that the administration had specifically ordered him not to open the dental
clinic before eight. So I was waiting, along with the specimens, until the
clinic was opened – and then I had to clean, sterilise, and start up everything
before starting work. It was almost half past eight before I had the first
specimen in the chair.
About eleven in the morning I was called to
speak to Bandarananda. Without even looking at me, he informed me that I was
dismissed and there was no need for me to come any more. When I demanded a
reason, he claimed that I was getting "too many phone calls" and that I was bringing in my own private specimens in the
mornings before 8am and treating them with the clinic’s materials. Allegedly, I
wasn’t sending them to the desk to get themselves registered. Well, I’d have to
be remarkably stupid to have done that, since I was entering all the names in my register, the one I had to maintain
to give a monthly breakdown of whom I was treating, and what treatment I was
doing. If I was bringing in my own specimens, wouldn’t I have simply avoided
entering their names in any records? I mean, that’s common sense, isn’t it?
Frankly, I wasn’t too unhappy at being
fired, since it freed me to concentrate on my private practice. It also freed
me to tell Bandarananda exactly what I thought of him – which I did, in quite
colourful language, and loudly enough so I’m sure enough of the other staff
heard for word to have got around. Then I went back to the clinic, finished
working on all the specimens, and only then
did I leave.
The laugh was on Bandarananda, actually,
since most of my regular specimens followed me over to my new practice. And later
he also ended up sacking both the other dentists, and getting blacklisted by
the dental supply firm which used to provide the materials, so yah boo sucks
and screw him too.
But it still seems strange to me that I was
sacked because I was working too sincerely to suit him.
