You know that box you have to fill out on doctor’s getting to know you forms? It’s somewhere after “Did your mom ever have cancer, depression, diabetes or beat you senseless with a leather strap?” and somewhere before “Who is your overpriced insurance company so we can overbill them and then adjust the bill when we realize they aren’t going to pay $500 for an office visit?” It says Employment Information.
That box always strikes fear in my heart. And the reasons are many-fold. The first being my inability to remember any physical address of an employer ever since I quit being an assistant where I had to repeatedly type and say my physical address over and over again to people who were coming to visit my boss, or deliver shoes to my boss, or bill five star hotel rooms to my boss, and, well, you get the point. Now that I’m a freelancer I’ve had 5 addresses in one year. Also in that time I’ve seen five new doctors (urologist, ENT, ENT surgeon, accupuncturist, fertility doctor) and every time I have to fudge a physical address and leave the zip code out. Because seriously, I drive there, park my car and know what street it’s on, but have no idea what the phone number is or how to mail a letter there. I don’t know why I worry about this but it must go back to my paranoia that they’re going to get mad at me if they need to get a hold of me and also, I worry they’ll think I’m a no good beatnik with a fake job and no source of income to pay their outrageous bills for procedures like stab me in the urethra and poke my ovaries with tiny needles. Which brings me to the next box - title.
I am a story producer for reality tv. I have worked on four new shows in the past year. When I say new, I mean, each of these shows were first season shows, so no one has heard of them. One was a spin off of a big reality show, so that helped, but doctor people aren’t Hollywood people, so when you say the name of a show they haven’t heard of you have to say stupid things like, so and so is my boss. And then doctor people, who think they’re being funny, say stupid things about your (tv famous) boss and you try to explain that no, really, you work for this person, and no, it’s not really ok to assume they’re just some dumb actor, because seriously, I don’t walk into the doctor person’s office and make fun of them for working out of a glorified strip mall and collecting semen samples in a badly decorated janitor’s closet. This is my job. And yes, we that make reality tv know that we’re easy targets, but I do it for a living. It’s not a hobby. It’s work. And I know it’s fun to make fun of Hollywood people with stupid jobs, but you should stop that. You need us like the lamprey needs the shark.
Maybe it’s just because I’m sick of hearing new doctors’ schtick (did , but the fertility doctor’s schtick was so… not the kind of thing that works for Seth and me that we have one more test to do there before we bail and see someone else. I don’t want to miss this cycle is the only reason we haven’t already bailed. I mean, coming out with guns blazing by making fun of my boss is one thing, but then to not get why we had concerns in another area and not read the situation in that area with sensitivity and care was beyond douchey. It was so the opposite of what I wanted in a fertility doctor.
But that’s also the beauty of Los Angeles. The next day, I went to work and complained about my doctor, and three people gave me recommendations for people they loved. People who understand our kind of people. Showbiz type people who don’t know their own work address.
