[Xist]

Notes were due Friday night. It is amazing how needy my family gets when I have a deadline. My brother kept turning my light off on me, asking me to do stuff for him, or just insisting that I got up, walked into the living room, and then he took me by the hand for a guided tour of the front room.

Seriously. He had me get up and walked me around the living room. That was it. That was all that he wanted.

I hope Mom made a list of all of the stuff that I said that I would do after I submitted my paperwork. There must have been 10 things!

It also seemed like old friends were coming out of the woodwork to catch up on Facebook or text messages.

It isn't like I can turn off the Internet and scratch my paperwork into stone tablets. I need to be able to receive feedback from my fearless leader so I can adjust my paperwork to match her ever-changing standards.

So, my progress reports were due Sunday at midnight and I started writing them Saturday morning.

She rejected my first four reports.

The first was for a client that I got from another therapist and they always do their paperwork horribly wrong.

Who the heck approves that?! Not only do they have their own supervisor, but there is an SLP in the office that reviews everything.

She rejected a few of mine.

I needed to rewrite all 4 progress reports for new clients and my supervisor rejected all of them.

I realized that the previous therapist had written a section horribly wrong--they just copied another section, which is probably why I didn't notice. What they wrote was appropriate, just not for that section. I looked at other clients' reports, put together something that seemed to have everything, and resubmitted it.

She rerejected it.

For the other three she told me “Review and resubmit.” She modified my report, but didn't give me any idea what. Without taking a great deal of time to save a draft, I didn’t have any way of knowing what she changed.

I asked, but didn’t hear back for almost 5 hours, so I told her that I would just do the best that I could, and when she inevitably rejected it I would make sure that I resubmitted them by the hard deadline of the 15th.

I kept writing reports, but I didn’t submit anything. I was hoping she would actually tell me what she wanted—unless what she wanted was to reject reports.

Eventually she responded with a full paragraph that just said “Review and resubmit. We can talk tomorrow.”

So, she does want to reject all of my reports!

Why not just tell me what she wants me to do differently, especially when I asked nicely?

I asked “What did you change?” and she just ordered: “Review and resubmit.”

These reports are on my name and my license. I wrote them and I am responsible for what they say. She has added some weird stuff to my reports. Poor grammar, awkward phrases, and one time she restated how I wrote up an activity.

Her version wasn’t true at all, so I rewrote it.

So, maybe she will change something and the Inspector General at the office will reject it, or maybe she will put something false in my report.

Why reject all of my reports, change each of them herself, tell me “Review and resubmit” every time, and then review them again before maybe finally approving them?

She has caught legitimate errors and she needed to reject them, but why plan on going through that circus when she could have sent me a text saying something like “Hey, this quarter mention that you consulted with the SLP in the first section and mention that therapy has been conducted on-line\in-person since [date] in the last section before the goals.”

Seriously! One text and she saves herself a great deal of time!

I wasn’t playing her game. I wasn’t going to ignorantly write reports wrong and give her the pleasure of rejecting them. I compared those 3 progress reports side-by-side with the previous ones, examined them word-for-word, made notes on the changes that I caught, and made sure that I included that in all of my reports.

So, she rejected a quarter of them. “Review and resubmit.”

Do push-ups!