“Sure you can,” he counters. “I’ll walk you through it. You just click on the icon that looks like a garbage can?—”
I giggle in spite of myself. “I know how to delete an email,” I tell him. “What I meant was . . . what if I delete something important?”
“That’s highly unlikely,” he says dryly. “This address is mostly for admin stuff. Patients who need to reach me go through Celine, and I have a separate account for my personal email. People I want to communicate with have my cell number, and they text.”
“Okay. But even still, I can’t . . .” I trail off when I catch his expression. Dr. Malone is amused. There’s a curve to his lips—he’s almost smiling— and the shocker is, it looks good on him.
“You said you’d do anything I wanted, Alexandra,” he points out. “And what I want you to do is deal with this inbox. You’ve done the hospital’s confidentiality training, right?”
“Yeah.” Confidentiality training took up an entire day of last week’s orientation.
“So go ahead and read the emails, and delete anything you don’t think a reasonable person would care about. That should take care of at least half.”
“Half?” I echo.
“Sure,” he says. “You have a hospital email address, right? You’ll see how much spam we get.”
“Yeah, I have an email. But IT said it may take a couple weeks before I’m added to all the mailing lists.”
“Well, you’ve got something to look forward to,” he says dryly. “There’s an amazing volume of spam. Then there are some where the reply is obvious, and you can look after those yourself. The rest you can stick in a folder for me to review.”
“Um, okay.”
I must look flustered, because his smile broadens. “Let’s go through the first few together and see how you do.”
He clicks open an email. “One of the elevators is out of service,” he says. “They’re trying to get it repaired. Now, Alexandra, does that seem like something I need to know?”
I shake my head.
“Very good.” He deletes the message and opens the next. “Now, this one is from the fundraising committee, trying to sell me tickets to a fifty-fifty raffle. Keep or trash?”
I read the answer in his expression. “Trash,” I say confidently.
“Gambling’s a vice,” he deadpans, clicking to delete it. “Ah,” he says, studying the next email. “This one’s more of a challenge. Dr. McDonald thinks it’s unfair that he only gets one and a half days of operating room time per week, while Dr. Chua gets two full days. What do you think?”
“Uh, I’d keep that one for you to review.”
Dr. Malone shakes his head. “Every single surgeon in the department wants more OR time, but there is none. The issue comes up every month at the division meeting, and I explain that I’m not planning to change the schedule. But people like to vent their unhappiness into my inbox, so I get a few emails a week about it. So you can delete those too.”
“Really?”
I must look unhappy about this approach, because he relents. “I guess if you really want, you can reply and say there’s no more OR time.”
“Okay.”
“All right. Moving on. Oh, this one’s from the CEO. He’s posted something new to his blog?—”
“The CEO has a blog?”
“Apparently,” he says with a shrug.
“What does he write about?”
Dr. Malone chuckles. “Damned if I know, that one’s a delete. Okay, next. Dr. Cunningham’s complaining that the ER doctors are giving him too many unnecessary consults. What would you do with this?”
“Keep for you,” I say confidently.
“Nah, this is a minor complaint, Alexandra, I can’t review all of these. In an average week, I get emails complaining about the residents, the OR nurses, the ward nurses, the porters, the pharmacists, and sometimes the patients.” He pauses. “Sometimes also the parking lot.”
