One of our junior doctors and I have been working together intermittently for months and only discovered this week that our phones have stopped talking to each other.
We showed our phones to each other on Tuesday and both show a series of one sided conversations. Because there’s always so much going on, and we can get in touch other ways, like phoning rather than texting, it wasn’t obvious enough to spot before now that we weren’t closing the loop on our communications, although it turns out each of us at different times have thought briefly that the other person was a bit rude. This would be followed by a moment of introspection “Surely that last comment deserved a smiley face at least? Help, have I overstepped the bounds of good taste somehow? Am I going to get in trouble?” and then we’d be swept up in some other more important clinical issue and forget all about it.
The cause is a mystery, also, but we’ve discovered WhatsApp is foolproof – except when sometimes, randomly, the hospital wifi decides it’s a social app that they won’t condone and that gets blocked as well…