your gold teeth

Amazing the things you think about in the dentist's chair: co-delivery of services? So in the time-honoured V V B tradition of making very little out of what was there in the first place, what about it?

It's because of the use of ultrasonic cleaning apparati, rather than the old manual curly metal stick. MInd you, they still have to use the curly metal stick, and some elbow-grease, to get the really hard bits of plaque. Now, the nice lady who currently cleans the unwholesome V V B teeth always asks me to hold the vacuum hose while she does the bit at the rear of the lower teeth. I always find this difficult because you can't actually see where the nozzle is, I also try to keep it away from where I think she has the ultrasonic thingo. The end result is that the vacuum doesn't pick up the water spray and I start to drown.

The thing is, I can't ever remember the previous quite nice lady asking me to assist in this procedure. So I started wondering about the niceties of a trained professional who evidently hasn't got all the skills (provided of course my memory is accurate, never a sure thing) getting the subject to lend a hand, and a nozzle in this case. As an aside, the apparent necessity for me to assist is exacerbated because bloody Medibank flamin' Private now only bears about 35% of the cost, down from about 50% some 5 years ago.

In a course I did a few years ago, we looked at (* let's come back to that phrase later shall we?) co-delivery of services. To the best of my recollection - the papers being at work - the examples were volunteers and prisoners. The theory with prisoners is that if they are well-behaved, they make the delivery of the 'service' - keeping 'em locked up - easier. You can see what they're getting at, but it still seems a little contrived, all the social aspects aside of course.

In the case of volunteers, it's almost outsourcing rather than co-delivery. I imagine much would depend on how closely any volunteer adhered to the norms/objectives etc of the organisation that is providing the service. This is probably only an issue where a voluntary organisation is providing services on bahlf of another entity, usually government.

* "We're looking at it." This seems to be the new bureaucratic phrase where you're not doing a proper, systematic examination of some subject or issue. It's what happens when imprecise instructions are given to someone who is fundamentally inadequate, unskilled or trained for the job. A quick and dirty, but with a figleaf of cover.

And because V V B rarely lets a post go by without some mention of the occupant of Kirribilli, while the cleaning of the lower teeth was being undertaken I was most disturbed to see, from the corner of my eye, my bottom lip sticking out. It instantly got me to forget about co-delivery of services and to get all preoccupied about the damage being done to the country, etc etc etc etc. Very disturbed.