Dentists and Voting Twice

There is a dentist office within walking distance to where I live that I've gone to for two and a half years. The dentist who previously took care of my teeth for nearly twenty years left his practice during Covid and his practice was bought out by a just-out-of-dental-school girl---young woman if I want to be political correct. The one and only time I saw her I really didn't actually SEE her at all. She was dressed in a head-to-toe pink hazmat suit and goggles. So was her dental assistant but the receptionist bravely had forgone wearing the hazmat suit and goggles but she had the full face guard and mask on as the other two wore. It was a surreal experience but that wasn't the reason I never when back. I mean who could blame them for protecting themselves during the height of the pandemic, a pandemic made worse by then President Trump who, at the time, was telling people about drinking bleach as bodies were stacking up in refrigerated trucks outside of hospitals. We tend to forget how bad things were back then. Now, we learn that Bob Woodward has Trump on a taped interview admitting---I say bragging---that he sent Vladimire Putin a Covid-19 test machine in the early days of the pandemic when we didn't have enough of them to go around to the hospitals here in the States.

I thought about all this while I was getting my teeth cleaned this week by an overly perky dental hygienist. The Woodward reveal must have put me in a surly mood because I was doing an amazing job of being borderline hostile to Miss Mary Sunshine. My replies were short, usually one word at a time---as if you can do more than that while your mouth is full of instruments. Why to they feel the need for a running conversation at a time like that? And why did I feel like making her work even harder than she was at trying to connect to me? When she announced she was finished, I couldn't believe it. It felt like she'd barely touched my teeth. There was no scaler tool used to scrap plaque off. It's done with sound waves now and what little poking around she did felt like she was applying about as much pressure as Tinkerbell could use. I was disappointed!

The next day I got three requests to fill out a survey about my visit to their humongous practice. The first two I ignored and the third one I opened, then filled out. I was kind and I didn't bad mouth the hygienist or the job she did. But I'll admit that I did start to type a comment about her trying too hard to be perky. Then I backed those words off my computer screen about as fast as I typed them in. What the heck was wrong with me? In a world full of hate and indifference I'll take perky and trying too hard any day. She was young and trying to put me as ease and I was being grumpy and jaded by something that had nothing to do with my teeth cleaning appointment.

I do miss my old dentist though. He was a friend before he became our dentist and there was nothing we couldn't say to one another but the guy liked to nit-pick and one time he wanted to remove two of my silver fillings. I hated to see them go. I’ve had them since my teen years---I was in my 60s at the time---but he thought they were worn out and in danger of cracking thus would damage the teeth in the process. He showed me photos of their surfaces to make his case. I told him I was sentimental about those fillings. He said, “Get over it.” And that’s how I ended up on his schedule to get two, new shiny white fillings. In a few weeks I'll be getting a new crown to replace one of those fillings. I'd put this off for the past year and finally consented to the work. I don't entirely trust dentists not to make up stuff that needs replacing. And why does the proposed work miraculously always cost what's left in my dental insurance plan? But I'm not one to gamble either on letting things go thus costing more in the long run.

Change in topic: I voted twice. Sixty-eight people in my building have to do that. We were sent ballots with the wrong school district candidates the first time and those ballots, if sent in already, will get rejected. There are a few people here who have no sense of logic and one of them was at a lunch table and she was worried she'd get in trouble with the law if she filled out the second ballot. No amount of trying to explain that she won't was getting through. "How will they know I'm not trying to vote twice for president?" "Because they set their machines up to invalidate the first ballots coming from our building so you'll only show up as voting once when you send in your new ballot." I was talking to MAGA voter and I wish I'd just let her think that using that second ballot will put her in jail. I use the tracking-your-ballot website to check on my vote and this year I'll actually have something interesting to see between the two ballot numbers I have to check on. When I told her that she said, "You can do that?" Duh! "Yes, that's why it gives the web address for tracking on the envelope." (In 20 point fonts, no less.) I could feel my grumpy and jaded persona creeping back in and I changed the topic to the hurricane. And that got me even grumpier when someone at the table parroted the lies Trump has been is telling about FEMA's response, lies that have just today the news is reporting have resulted in armed threats against FEMA workers at a couple of their staging sites. Why are some people so quick to believe the conspiracy nonsense coming out of Trump's mouth over that of the boots-on-the-ground disaster personal?  ©