Part whatever at this point.

I bitch a lot about my job. Mostly because dealing with the pet owning public is enough to turn one into a raving lunatic in a remarkably short period of time.
And while there are a lot of things that I wish I could change about my *job*, I love my profession with a passion.

I’m a boards monitor for the megalith that is known as the Veterinary Information Network. We’re a group of better than 50K veterinarians around the world who meet online to share cases, research, tips, lunacy, whateverall. And being a boards monitor means that I moderate discussions in four of the medical boards. I make sure that the volunteer specialists answer people’s questions in a timely manner, I help bring specialists from other areas into a discussion as needed, and I occasionally wear my Hall Monitor sash and tattle non-subscribers or non-veterinarians using some subscriber’s account (we’re a little snotty that way). It also means that I’m online a LOT and checking in on discussions that I might not otherwise have had the opportunity or interest in opening.

Case in point.
In the last week on my four boards alone I have participated in a discussion about a fractured incisor tooth in a kangaroo (really cool radiographs by the way), a discussion on the ethics of various types of mousetrap, and have read a research paper about whether or not pouched rats are less effective landmine detection animals if they are castrated (they’re not).

And in one of the other discussions in which I have been participating for the last five years I ran across two of the most awesome sentences I think may have ever been written in the English language.
My friend Astrid, a exotics and wildlife DVM in California, was talking about how the tiger cub at the big cat rescue where she works has ringworm. We were all giving her a hard time about who got to give antifungal dips to the tiger cub (onetwothreeNOTIT!!) and she mentioned that at least this time the resident dog hasn’t gotten ringworm yet. And I quote: “The last time I made the keepers do the dips. It was them that let the dog play with the tiger.”

My job has its downfalls, but I do love my profession!