You can find one on e-Bay, or Amazon, or Williams Sonoma – maybe even your local grocery store. I prefer the type that has sand running between glass or Lucite vessels – the hourglass type.
Have I ever mentioned that I detest runny eggs? Probably not, and I will rectify that forthwith. I don’t care if it is a soft-boiled egg, a poached egg, or an over-easy egg. Runny egg yolks are nasty. Now, if you, like some of my family members, like runny yolks, all I can say is knock yourself out – just don’t serve me such a thing. I would rather skip the meal. After all, unlike my cats, I do not believe that I will starve to death because I missed a breakfast or a dinner.
Amazon has cute, little, plastic, 3-minute sand timers for about ten bucks – in case you need one for your runny egg yolks. You can set a smart phone timer instead, of course, but in so doing, you will ruin any culinary credibility that you may have accumulated up to the moment that you commit such heresy – just saying.
My fondest memory of the 3-minute, hourglass type, timer is from my Internal Medicine residency. Our program director, having suffered through a few weeks of meandering Morning Report presentations given by first year residents, brought such a timer to our conference room in 1979.
He announced that “a proper patient presentation should require no more than 3-minutes – the amount of time it takes to prepare a soft-boiled egg. You state the patient’s presenting circumstances, relevant past history, physical findings, laboratory study results, findings of imaging studies, and then tell us what diagnosis and treatment plan you chose.” His instructions were clear and concise, and all of the first-year residents struggled to deliver their subsequent patient presentations within three minutes. Alas!
I should mention that story telling is a critical part of Internal Medicine practice. It is as important that the patient/family be able to tell a concise and relevant story regarding the patient’s illness as it is for the physician to be able to do the same when delivering his/her report to consultants and fellow clinicians. That said, some of us tell a more engaging and/or informative story than others given the same set of facts.
And this is where we discover that time can be elastic – tedious chores seeming to last forever whereas pleasant ones lasting only a minute or two. During our morning report sessions that first year, I quickly learned that I could present a case for five minutes or more and never “run out the timer,” because my program director became so engaged in the story that the timer ran out unnoticed. This wasn’t a deliberate ploy on my part, but rather a consequence of how my brain organized and delivered relevant information.
Whether this was a blessing, or a curse, is up for conjecture. I can only say that I enjoyed telling the stories of my team’s work with every new patient, and our director seemed to find them sufficiently engaging and informative to ignore the 3-minute timer.
And, if the egg had boiled until the end of my presentation, the sucker would have been hard-boiled and up to my gustatory expectations.
I, too, detest runny eggs. I was an adult before I discovered that you can order fried eggs over-well. Problem solved!
And o loved your account of telling an engaging story on rounds. Whenever I read stories about your training, I always think about Jordan and his Famiky Practice residency beginning next year.
I hope that Jordan finds himself in a program in which both his residency mates and his mentors are as supportive as mine were. “Healthy competition” almost always turns into a zero-sum endeavor with winners and losers when the proper goal should be learning rather than winning.
And if he should need to polish his presentation skills for morning report or rounds, tell him to buy a 3-minute egg timer. 🙂