The mighty "Day Job" or what I do when I don't play with Biodiesel...

This post is dedicated to all the great folks out there that have asked where I've been hiding the past couple months. Thanks for the concern. It means a lot....yet another reason why I think being involved in Biodiesel is just so cool! Such great people!

Anyway, since some have asked "Where in the world did Graydon go?" I figured I'd tell ya all where I've been hiding.

In short, I've been in a tall office building in downtown Salt Lake City, Ut and in a small community called Orem, Utah at a small occupational health clinic.

And now "the REST of the story...."

Besides having my Biodiesel Business (which is my REAL passion), I also hold a day job.
I work for the largest health organization in the State of Utah. It's called Intermountain Healthcare and it's the 800 lb gorrilla of Health Organizations here.

I work for a division called Intermountain WorkMed where I'm an Application Systems Analyst, which is just a glorified way of saying I play with computers all day.

I support 11 Occupational Health Clinics from an IS perspective. 9 of them run a program called Systoc which is the program that we use to track every interaction with a patient in our clinics (and I mean EVERYTHING!!!...if you Sneeze we probably track it in there....but seriously...).

Besides just supporting this application, I also analyze lots & lots of data from this system (I AM an ANALYST ya know) and recommend changes to certain things. As part of my "analyst" role, I also have been doing a major "Clinic Redesign" project throughout all of our major clinics.

I essentially go into a clinic, document every little thing they do, from the time a patient walks through our door until the last dime is paid on the bill, look at it with a critical eye & see where things can be done more efficiently or just standardized.

Our clinics over time have "morphed" if you will into what they are today. Several of them all started out as just measely departments of a nearby hospital that's part of Intermountain Healthcare and then as they grew they were "adopted" into a "corporate" network. Because they were pretty much all left do to as they wanted, we had several clinics doing lot's of different things from the others.

One of my big roles in my job there is to standardize everything we do so that if you go to one clinic, you'll get the same level of care as if you went to another clinic. As well as standardizing things, I also have a huge role in "redesigning" the clinics from a patient flow perspective right down to how the bills get paid.

Well, over the past few years I've spent a large majority of my time doing these redesigns. Just about the time I got into biodiesel I had just finished up doing a rather large redesign with one of our clinics and had a chance to kind of "breathe again". It was during this time that I got into biodiesel and went "hog wild" with it.

We still had a few clinics left for me to redesign (which essentially involves me camping out at the clinic for several weeks at a time, hovering over people, documenting, meetings, meetings, meetings, & more meetings with staff to identify and resolve problems, training the staff on the new procedures being put in place and then making sure everything works & fixing anything that doesn't. Needless to say, it takes A TON of time.

Our clinics are separated by about a 500 mile difference from our furthest north clinic to our furthest south clinic. This means on any given day I can be anywhere within that network, but mainly I stay close to the one's near Salt Lake City.

Well, over the past few months I've been working on a particularly large redesign for our Orem facility. It's our largest clinic and has the most staff to work with so it's kind of a logistical nightmare. Add to that that it's our busiest clinic and is usually always running short staffed for one reason or another and you've got one amazing challenge to deal with.

Also add to the fact that it's a good hour's drive from my house to the clinic ONE WAY and you can quicly see where my evening's get spent....behind the wheel on a freeway....when I'd much rather be in front of a computer doing biodiesel stuff.

The past few weeks have been REALLY time consuming and I've been in that facilty (including tonight) nearly every day.

Add to that one heck of a snow storm today and my 1 hour drive home turned into a painful 3 hour drive! (UGH!!!!)

So, with the fact that my only day's "away" from the clinic are spent in my office in Salt Lake City "catching up" on everything else I do for the job, you can see "spare time" is at a premium these days.

And then throw in the fact that I was sick most of January & part of December, then had sick kids, a sick wife, and, well, this new year has just been one lousy year for time spent with biodiesel fun lately.

Luckily, my big redesign project is nearing the end in Orem, however, I get to start another one shortly after that in a town called Logan which is North of where I live. The drive is about 1 1/2 hours (oh joy!) and it's in even worse shape than our Orem facility...add to the fact that things there go slower than a turtle on sleeping medicine, and you've got the idea of what fun the next month will be.

So......that's where I've been hiding.....not intentially of course, but until the side business get's large enough to completely pay for our household (ever pay for doctor bills for two sick kids, a sick wife, and a sick "man of the house"?) plus all the other fun stuff that goes with it and never enough time to devote to my business to really do some of the things that I'd like and you get an idea of what life around the Blair Household has been like.

So, that's the jist of it. Oh yeah, also add to that trying to keep up with the business (which is growing quite well despite my lack of time to do "what I'd REALLY like to do" with it) and you can see there's been no time left to play.

I did get to go & see a really cool biodiesel event today.

There's a new company called Domestic Energy Partners in Orem that's developed a technology to process biodiesel w/ a solid catalyst. You can see who they are here: Betterbiodiesel.com They showed off their cool technology today and last week I got to go & spend a couple hours with the president of the group and talked to him about his product and biodiesel in general.

Pretty cool stuff!

So, back to the grindstone I go.....

-Graydon
The Rabid Biodiesel Nut