The Medical Check-up "Assembly Line"!

Chinese are definitely very organized! I would say way too organized based on my experience when I went to take the mandatory medical checkup for my work permit.

Have you ever seen an assembly line? If not in person, maybe on TV? The assembly lines like the ones Honda has to build its cars, or the ones computer hardware companies have to assemble their motherboards? If you haven't seen or don't remember, please allow me to paint the picture of an assembly line first. Say, Honda is assembling the car body. Its not like the old days where the car is assembled at a single spot and workers move around it assembling. Now the car-being-assembled moves from one spot to another, and as it moves forward it is slowly built up by adding one or two pieces at a time! With this system, remove the people and you can add robots that will do the intensive, manual, repetitive work. Each robot specializes in doing one job and does that job only, forever. I hope your mind has a rough picture of the assembly line now. Infact, its beautiful and mesmerizing to look at an assembly line.

Now all you need to do in the painted picture is to remove the car and imagine me instead of the car. Ofcourse, remove the robots and put in nurses. Yes, I was a patient in the check-up assembly line being 'serviced' (ofcourse, not assembled, that would be weird! Wouldn't it be?!) by a bunch of nurses.

So for the medical check, you go into the clinic, fill out a form and register. That's it! You get a full assembly line service, nuts and bolts to upholstery and body panel to quality checks and full body wash with wax and tire dressing. Oops! Sorry, I fell back to the car analogy. You definitely don't get a full body wash with wax and tire dressing, you almost get an equivalent of everything else I mentioned for the car!!! :)

There is a long hallway and either side are rooms labeled ominously as Ultrasound, X-Ray, Blood sample, Gynecology, etc!! You are guided by two cute female staff onto the chairs that are placed along the walls of entire stretch of the hallway. Then the 'servicing' and jigsaw puzzle starts! Oh yeah, I will explain the jigsaw puzzle part of this assembly line in a short while! You kickoff with blood sample. Two nurses sit behind a counter. You get to sit in front of the chosen one and thrust out your hand on the counter. You get a very efficient and awfully quick wipe down of your arm with alcohol and in goes the syringe, all this in a blink of an eye! Even before you can make a face showing you are afraid of syringes, you are staring at the blood draining out of your arm. They definitely use the shock factor to their advantage. Before the shock is over your blood sample is done and you are out on the hallway for the next servicing stop!!!

Now comes the jigsaw puzzle. This is why I said they are efficient!! Once you get out to the hallway you don't blindly go to the next stop. Instead, you are expertly guided by the two cute staff to a chair in front of one of those many stops, whichever is free. So they are constantly working on the puzzle of moving people around between the stops based on what's available. You are even politely suggested to move one chair closer to the door of the next stop when the person in front of you goes in to that room!!! I bet they are experts in queuing algorithms! :)

So there was this French girl in front of me in the registration line. Once we went into the hallway and recognized this awesomely well oiled, efficient servicing assembly line, we couldn't stop laughing. By the second stop once we realized the puzzle part of it, we started to bet which one of us will finish first. Care to guess who finished first? Ofcourse, logically its me!! Why so? Did you read the list of stops we had that I have listed above?! Yes, there was an extra Gynecology section that I didn't have to go!!!!! Woohhooo... India beats France in this Chinese assembly-line-puzzle!!! :)

All in all, I had a very comprehensive medical check, infact, enough checks in those 30 mins that I have not had all these years of my life!!! Wont you now agree that the Chinese are super efficient and good at puzzles too?! :)