"100% of people who do not save money do not have any!"--Dave Ramsey

[Xist]

The listing for this house was taken down, which is weird. Zillow doesn't show it at all! It shows Mom's house which hasn't been for sale in almost 2 decades!

[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!

[Piotrsko]

Sounds to me like your super is generating grounds for dismissal. Being the super, she has no need to be truthful and automatically negates any defense you proffer.

[Xist]

She has worked there longer and I feel confident that they hire every SLP they can, while they hire as many SLPAs as they have SLPs to supervise.

I check everyday and there still are not any other speech therapy opportunities up here or anything that pays better.

[JSH]

Originally Posted by Xist

She has worked there longer and I feel confident that they hire every SLP they can, while they hire as many SLPAs as they have SLPs to supervise.

I check everyday and there still are not any other speech therapy opportunities up here or anything that pays better.

All the more reason to make your supervisor happy. Your job is to make her life easy.

[redpoint5]

Skimmed because TLDR.

I can sympathize with finding incompetence and waste in nearly any direction I look. The solution to eliminating that from work, which is 1/4 of your life, is to be your own boss. I'm not there yet, but I anticipate a lower stress level when I'm the only idiot to blame.

Most people find the pressure of being the only idiot to blame to be too much responsibility, which is why they work for other idiots.

[Xist]

I still plan on setting up my own agency and hiring my own supervisor as soon as I put my Civic together.

I will put my Civic together once I send in both Lenovos and apply for grad school, but I don't know why NAU would accept me now when they rejected me twice before. I continue to have more experience, but they are a school. They only value grades and letters of recommendations from professors.

I didn't talk to my professors outside of class because I was too busy studying. Everything made sense, I just couldn't remember it!

I have every confidence that grad school will be completely different. I won't have dozens of classmates arriving late, leaving early, and talking amongst themselves, playing on their phones, and using Facebook on their laptop, but will that be enough for me to hear and remember virtually everything that the professor says?

I can earn more as an SLP than an SLPA, but if I have my own agency, even if there are only two of us, I doubt the difference will be significant.

Arizona pays about $135 an hour for SLPAs in rural areas like here and $150 for SLPs. I talk about paying my supervisor $150 an hour, so if I worked 10 hours at $135 and paid her $150 to supervise one hour, I bring home $120 hourly.

If I were an SLP I could earn 25% more.

My GI Bill will cover graduate school and provide me a monthly stipend, but this program requires me to maintain 20 hours a week, which I haven't since I declined to work with kids that cough, sneeze, and laugh in my face.

They are waiving the GRE right now. I scored extremely well, but they still require the hours, which are harder to get.

It feels wrong to not swing.

So, I will apply. If any on-line programs are still accepting applications I will apply there, too.

I figured that it cost $40,000 to earn a Bachelor's from a state school in Arizona. Maybe graduate school would cost $30,000, but I don't need to worry about that.

Could I handle full-time graduate school with my current caseload?

Eh...

I don't want to start my own agency so I can tell my supervisor "Clearly state your expectations or I will find someone else."

I just want more hours. In fact, I would try to continue working for my current agency. If they had a problem with it I should be able to ask if I could bring over the clients that I found on my own.

I might ask if I could bring over the supervisor that I found on my own!

My brother's speech therapist just became an SLP. She complains that her boss doesn't pay better or provide more things for free, but I think that she was paid $115 before, and I believe that she is paid around $137.50 now.

She would earn more by going rogue [and her boss is annoying], but opening an agency is a huge task, and she would receive a 17.6% raise.

While she complains about pay she bought a new truck and a house on 5 acres within the last year.

How about the opportunity cost of graduate school?

Let's say that I could maintain my current caseload and get 10 clients on my own or go to graduate school, where I would struggle to see my original clients and need to pass the ones that I found on my own to my supervisor.

Arguably, graduate school would cost $1,200 per week for 100 weeks.

Then I would be eligible to earn $50,000 for 10 months at a school!

Retirement and benefits sound useful.

If I could see the same 12 + 10 clients after graduate school I would receive a $15 raise with the existing agency and $30 at the heretofore imaginary one.

$15 * 12 = 180. $30 * 10 = hmm...

Earning an extra $480 a week--ah dang.

So, it would take 5 years to make up the opportunity cost of graduate school.

[Xist]

I didn't know what there was to discuss. Is she supposed to rewrite everything herself and never tell me what I am doing wrong or is she supposed to establish clear expectations?

A large part of speech therapy is helping people to express their wants and needs and their goals may look just like this: [Supervisor] will clearly state her wants and needs 8/10 times with minimal prompting."

My clients need to express their wants and needs, but not my supervisor?

She did criticize a great deal, though.

"Complaining about a problem without proposing a solution is called whining."--Theodore Roosevelt

Boss seemed to agree that she needed to tell me what she wanted and didn't contradict me that rewriting all of my progress reports herself, rejecting them, having me sign off on them, and then approving them again took more of her time than seemed necessary.

She complained that I don't respond to all of her e-mails and text messages.

I have looked over her recent e-mails and text messages. None of them were more important than my deadline, so I went back to work.

However, Boss totally agreed with her. He felt that he had every reason to believe that I refused to communicate because he had the same experience with me!

Wait, what?

Let me tell you what I wish had happened instead of a 20-minute conversation about the new version of our paperwork site:

“Hey Xist, your invitation probably expired. I am sending you a new one. Please knock out that now.”
“Done.”
“Great! Enjoy your day!”

I received two text messages and many e-mails about this. Each time I saw that it wasn’t due until after my notes, progress reports, and my graduate school application, so I resumed working on those.

At least the first two.

The moral of the story is: If you need a subordinate to do something easy, don’t give them a deadline weeks away, ask them to do it today, and then follow up if they don’t.

[JSH]

Originally Posted by Xist

She complained that I don't respond to all of her e-mails and text messages.

I have looked over her recent e-mails and text messages. None of them were more important than my deadline, so I went back to work.

However, Boss totally agreed with her. He felt that he had every reason to believe that I refused to communicate because he had the same experience with me!

Wait, what?

How did you expect that would turn out?

What does "reassigning" mean?

[Xist]

She doesn't want me anymore, so he will find me a new home.

When I got my EIDL loan Bank of America said that I would give me $400 if I made 5 qualified purchases, but not too early, and not too late.

There are strict rules with this loan. I can only use it for ongoing expenses, but I have different expenses for teletherapy than for in-person sessions.

One thing that I do regularly is apply for graduate school.

I found the rules and I needed to make those qualified purchases between 16 and 75 days after opening the account, so last June or July, long before I could apply for graduate school.

I just can't win!