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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Might be more of a developmental impairment. For children, magical thinking is normal and expected. They might sincerely think they can cause something to happen by thinking about it or engaging in some kind of paranormal way. Like, if a 4 year old points at you with a finger guns gesture and yells ‘bang’, they might just be trying to be silly; but they might also be genuinely trying to kill you. You’ll know if immediately after, they look down at their finger-gun with a wtf expression cuz they’re actually surprised it didn’t work.

    Again, normal. Unnerving, but normal.

    They should grow out of that shit by about age 7 iirc.

    Lots of people never grow out of it, they just compartmentalize that kind of thinking as religion… they know they can’t kill you with finger guns, but Jesus? His finger guns are real!!.

    Those people need a fuck ton of therapy.






  • No idea how they dispose of it. I’ve asked my immediate management chain if I can take damaged/pitted instruments that need to be replaced to donate to the local colleges - Anatomy & Physiology classes all have a lab component to dissect something, and the school I went to had instruments that were absolute garbage.

    The answer was no… We just put instruments that need to be replaced in a red bin with other sharps like needles, and the bins are shipped off somewhere, probably to be incinerated.

    Bigger stuff like equipment, we send to the biomedical engineering department for outprocessing. From there, no idea. Probably land fill.

    I wouldn’t dumpster dive at a hospital though. It’ll be a sea of ruptured catheter bags, linens saturated with poop, and just all manner of pathogens. And probably sharps - that stuff is supposed to go in sealed red bins, but all it takes is one lazy employee and you’ve got yourself an HIV+ needle stick.


  • I work in an operating room, and have been around long enough to see multiple pieces of perfectly good equipment get replaced just because it hit the manufacturer’s end-of-life date.

    I’m talking things like a several-hundred-thousand dollar microscope for microsurgery.

    Basically that date means if the microscope fucks up somehow, the vendor takes zero liability, and any legal expenses fall onto the hospital… so we trash it and buy another one. Rinse and repeat after another few years.

    That end-of-life date is always crazy early, and is like that 100% because the manufacturer knows hospitals would rather just treat a quarter million dollar microscope as disposable than accept liability for an equipment fault.

    The waste is unreal.