For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for October 10, 2018

Luckily Mrs. Divot didn’t hear THAT remark.

“My home number is listed.” John Patterson, have you gone insane?

Didn’t say anything about How it was listed.

I’ve read many of those “Interviews with Nurses/Doctors” lists (back when lists were all the rage), and most indicate that this is a real phenomenon, though they probably stopped once patients got wise to the scheme and started asking what their little notations actually meant.

As you might imagine, dark comedy reigned in places where death was a frequent occurrence.

Yes, but how many “Patterson, J” listings are in the book…. he doesn’t say, does he?

You get those people as well.

When I first started in nursing over 4 decades ago I would often see the notation “PITA.” Having not learned this in class, I finally asked a doctor. His response: “pain in the a$$.”

Got to love all the PTINs in our lives (at least that’s what they tell me).

I’m reminded of an old Benny Hill joke, “People say he’s a pain in the neck. I have a much lower opinion of him.”

I’ve used the anagram PITA for years. One guess what the “A” stands for.

I do personnel/hiring for a local orchestra. I’ve long had a “DBDNH” file, for musicians who didn’t show up, lost music and blamed me, etc. The sanitized version is “Dirt Bag— Do NotHire”. It became a running joke between me and other local personnel managers.

Never heard PITA, but am quite familiar with PIA and PIB.

Lynn’s Notes:

Did I ever get into hot water over this one! Clinic staff wrote to say that it was a terrible thing to write notes in patients’ files suggesting they were difficult to work with and that PITN should never have been used. Well, we did write small notations like this just for our own information…and, the letters were: PITA!

In the hospitality industry, it was not uncommon, in the per-computer days, for a manager, a reservationist, or a front desk clerk, to make a small annotation on the top of a guest’s file PIA ( we never bothered with the T ) to warn other employees of a difficult guest.

Without giving away the secrets of the trade, hotels and resorts employees will still note ( electronically ) on your file, if you’re a PITA. They just use less obvious “codes” to do so !

How much does Johnston have to make before it’s enough? Aren’t there other cartoonists whose lives would be changed if she opened up here thousands of spots?

A guy who ran a print shop told me his invoices always included an “A.S. Factor” charge, which was added to cover unexpected costs such as press breakdowns or general “Murphy’s Law”-type problems common to the industry. No one had ever questioned it until one day a customer asked what “A.S.” meant. He told him it stood for “Aw, sh__ !”

“PITA” was a well-known acronym in my workplace.

The correct notation, John, is P.I.T.A.!

It’s actually P.I.T.A.

Hard to believe this woman is complaining about free dental care.

At the end of my first High School Bowl season, we were given a tour of the technical aspects of the game. An electronic box with our names told who had buzzed in first. One of my teammates had an unpleasant theory about why his name was marked “AH.”

In light of today’s strip, I found an ad for the Fairchild Society, which is a private organization that pays for dentistry for special needs children. http://www.hfgrotto.org/donate/fairchild-society/

Since Lynn Johnston made so much on a strip about her dentist husband, I would imagine she is quite familiar with and supportive of this charity.