Denim Days

Bishopville, S.C.

I've featured Bottle Trees before and wonder if that makes this a Pot Tree.

What an odd day. I was up bright and early for off site meetings at Trident Technical College. We do fundraisers at these management meetings by offering the option to dress down and wear jeans if employees pay $5 to support a charity. It works well, everyone is happy and it's an easy way to collect a nice pot of cash for a worthy cause. It was gray and drizzling out and I arrived to the word that our long awaited hospital inspectors had arrived at the hospital at 7:30 am.

Quick surprise turn around. Almost every manager in the system was at the meeting in casual jeans and sneakers and now they had to quickly back track to the hospital for one of our most critical credentialing days. Whooopsie! We have these Joint Commission surveys every three years but are never told exactly when the team of surveyors will show up. The idea is that we should always be prepared.

Today was the first of three days of scrutiny and from what I hear everything went very well but I'll never forget the look of all of our senior staff in their jeans and sneakers on survey day. It reminded me of kids caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

Wish us luck for the rest of the week and hope that my own caste of volunteer characters makes us proud.