Dear Mentor Who Won’t Talk to Me Anymore:
I don’t know why you won’t talk to me.
Really, it’s probably none of my business.
But it’s kind of humiliating, when you used to be my biggest cheerleader (I know that was 30 years ago ) when I leave you cheerful, confident messages about my current prospects in your voicemail and you don’t return the call.
Or the Email. Or the text.
I’m in a bit of a fix because I have a good job prospect, one that will be less stressful and make it less likely that I pass out, be hospitalised with an unknown stress influenced illness, and see double out of lack of sleep. Anyway the manager of this facility says they want references right away. I can ask other people for references, but I’m not convinced you hate me yet. Maybe you feel bad because when you told me to stay at my job in 2011, they kept me in the dungeon, in various torturous devices, demanding to know what my patients’ addresses were and what the diagnostic code for a patient I’d seen a month ago was. Maybe it’s because you offered me a job and gave it to someone else.
Regardless, Mentor, I still feel like I must get in touch with you some way. If you don’t like me anymore that’s fine (see “none of my business “above) , I likely will not want to use you as a reference, but I would like to know. If it turns out this was only a big misunderstanding, and of COURSE you’ll happily be a reference, so much the better.
Yet telephone, voicemail, emails and texts have failed to elicit your response, Mentor, so I have compiled some possible alternate ways to reach you that will be more successful (maybe).
I could pretend to be a window washer and wave my arms furiously when you come to the window. This idea suffers from the fact that you have no windows in your office. I’m working on getting a contact in the women’s hospital, which has a lot of windows, to try and sell you one.
I could mail myself to you in a large box.
I could send you and your wife free tickets for a Caribbean yacht cruise. When you come aboard no and get settled for the trip…guess who the captain turns out to be ? (No, not Capn. Quigg; it’s yours truly…maybe I shouldn’t use you as a reference!)
I can come parachuting through the glass ceiling between the ER and the Psych ER.
Candygram!
What about a singing telegram? You know, I come in singing “I’m so wild about my Mentor, he’s just wild about meeeeeeeee…”
Land shark! No, too scary.
The possibilities are endless. Still, I just wish you’d give me a reference.
Referently,
K. McAshton, LMSW, brilliant clinician with a past checkered with mistakes
