Dale wants numbers

Dale Hutchins did the thing this morning where he asks about utilisation and calls it just a temperature check. Four years I have been at that practice. I bring in more than I cost by a margin I have actually sat down and worked out, which I did one night in February for no reason except that I wanted to know whether the feeling was real. It is real. And he still talks to me in the register of a man managing somebody who might be about to drop a ball. I do not think he means anything by it. That is almost the worst part — there is nothing to confront. It is a tone. You cannot take a tone to a meeting. Private practice came into my head again and I put it back down again, which I have now done so many times that the putting down is more automatic than the picking up. Fourteen clients at my own rate is better than twenty two at his. I know the number. The thing that stops me is not the number, it is that fourteen is a number I would have to produce myself every month, and Danny's income is a shape rather than a number, and two shapes do not make a household. So I stay. And every six weeks Dale asks about utilisation and I feel it in my jaw for an afternoon.