"Trust Me." (Except sometimes you can't. How do you "comparison shop" for blood work?)

[Nay]

14. Want to hear a horror story from the other side of the counter?

20 years ago I was training as a medical technologist. In a rotation at a hospital in Alabama, I walked in the first day and....

was put on the machine that processes tubes of blood and spits out the results. With no instruction, no oversight (the lab techs all were in a FIVE-HOUR meeting), nothing. I had no idea what I was doing, and no one else in the lab (all trainees from my class!) did, either. We of course had training in the theory of what these machines did, but the classroom never has actual machines in it; you are supposed to learn all that in hospital rotations under the constant tutelage of experienced operators. I was terrified, mainly because I was sure I'd mess up and someone would die over it. Too bad the employees didn't seem to care.

That was one of the reasons I quit the program.