So I learned yesterday that if you are in an Emergency Room waiting room, looking bad is what gets you through the system quickly. My daughter had her foot “guillotined” by a table at school, so she and I went to the emergency room to have the massive lump on her foot looked at. The room was filled “to the gunnels” with folks coughing, the elderly and the injured, and I thought we’d be there for at least 8 hours.
We were triaged, and the lady there was nice enough to comment, “We take these kind of injuries ahead of coughs”, which made me think we’d only be there for 6 hours. Sure enough, we were called up and sent to X-ray, went back to see a doctor, who brought up my daughter’s X-ray on a computer Monitor (a nice big one)(that was the coolest thing, no film, just zoom in on the computer screen). The Doctor’s comment was, “Nothing is broken, it’s just a HUGE lump due to soft tissue damage”, bing, bang boom, we were out of there in 2 hours flat. My daughter still has a huge lump, which she ices and keeps elevated, and I have new respect for looking bad, but not being bad.
OK, what does this have to do with Personal Finances? Sometimes things look a lot worse than they are, but ignoring them and hoping they get better is the real danger. If you have a large debt load or credit card debt, do something about it NOW, it might not be as bad as you think, but if you wait and hope for the best, you really never know how bad it was or whether you made it worse by waiting.
Oh and Emergency room visits go faster if you are: Polite to everyone, look bad but don’t complain a lot and if your foot has a lump on it the size of a pineapple.
