LOUISVILLE, KY – Witnesses were reportedly stunned yesterday when Dr. Montgomery “Monty” Rutherford, an 85-year-old internist, performed a quadruple click in a heroic attempt to access a patient’s electronic medical record.
“A simple double click would have sufficed,” explained Lori Taylor, a second-year internal medicine resident. “But 4 clicks?! Man, he really went after it.”
Unfortunately, after successfully opening the chart, the two additional clicks resulted in immediate closure of the chart Rutherford had just opened. The confused octogenarian then stared at the screen for close to 30 seconds trying to understand the series of events that had just taken place. During that time, he appeared to haphazardly move the cursor slowly over different parts of the screen as he tried to figure out where his next quadruple click should be.
From there, Rutherford’s situation became more and more hopeless. He inexplicably logged out of the electronic medical record completely, perhaps attempting some variation of “turn it off and then turn it back on” in order to achieve his ultimate goal of entering a single patient chart. He then proceeded to hunt-and-peck his username and password without having the cursor in the appropriate text box. This was followed by an additional 20 seconds of trying to understand where his diligent, head-down typing had gone.
Once his credentials were meticulously typed in to the correct location, Rutherford chose to avoid simply pressing “Enter,” instead navigating the mouse to the “Log In” button and executing a well-timed triple click. Likely sensing the futility of the previous 5 minutes of computer work, the frustrated physician reportedly left the workstation to place a central venous catheter in the ICU.
