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PaperclipPerfector  23hr ago (text post)   748 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 10, 2026

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I recently had my third child and my much younger brother broke his leg. As a result, I’m spending a lot of time in doctors offices, medical offices, and physical therapy outfits.

For whatever reason I started to notice that every one of these places have these big horseshoe front desks with somewhere between 6-12 women working. They’re generally between 20-60 years old, natural blonde or dye job, mostly slightly overweight or seriously overweight, at least one tattoo, and all of them pretty miserable. These are the working women proles. When people talk about the outrageous healthcare costs, I can’t help but think that it’s all a racket and jobs program. Healthcare companies make a nice margin and get an army of women that toe the line with “public health” and collect a paycheck.

I’m 42. It wasn’t always like this.

I’m saying this all tongue in cheek for Friday fun. But I am kinda curious what people think about the socio-economic-political forces that are driving this.

Is it the same in the UK? In China? I’ve been to a Chinese hospital. That seemed like a lot of young village type Chinese in white uniforms and hats.

What makes these people so miserable? Do people go into this field and turn into this stereotype? Or do the stereotype people get attracted to this field?

A couple of things are happening here.

Part of it is the decline the secretary - it used to be that most of these people would be one capable secretary, those women now work "real" jobs and much of the duties have been outsourced onto doctors, outlook, and other similar stuff. Some of the job remains, but the talent pool is...lower.

Healthcare often actually involves razor thin margins, immense government subsidy, unions or government employees and all kinds of other crap. Someone has to man the phones and officially do the job. Usually they don't, so you hire more people hoping that enough women at the desk creates some function.

It doesn't. During training usually I did my job and the front desk's job.

I find this conversation so triggering so I'm a bit disorganized here but other poster's have noted an element of claims and other things, usually the people sitting at the front desk are the front desk staff and do front desk things, but it's not necessarily going to be obvious if it isn't also an MA workstation, or someone who does insurance stuff, it just seems like a homogeneous pile of women.

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