Say It Changed
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
Got a number off the scanner, F for final, case is closed
Everyone breathes easy, everybody's dosed
But the lab calls back at midnight, "we made a small mistake"
Same patient, same box, different fate
Don't paint over, don't paint over
Don't you dare just type it in again
Say it changed! Say it changed!
Show me when and show me who and when
A correction ain't a new result, it's the old one wearing a scar
Hide that stitch and you're the reason it goes far
Preliminary! (P is not the truth, just a guess that's dressed in blue!)
Final comes! (and if it's different, who's gonna tell you?)
No flag, no shout, no red light on the wall
Just a quiet little swap and nobody sees it fall
Unsolicited results with nowhere left to land
Don't you dump 'em in the bin like sweepings off the sand!
Ten orders sent, but I only count eight
That's not a result, that's a locked and silent gate
Where's the range, where's the flag, where's the file that shows it's true?
Somebody trusted a number — was it built for you?
Don't paint over, don't paint over
Don't you dare just type it in again
Say it changed! Say it changed!
Show me when and show me who and when
A correction ain't a new result, it's the old one wearing a scar
Hide that stitch and you're the reason it goes far
Keep the old, keep the new
Keep the range and the flag too
Every version, plain in view —
Say it changed, say it's true
The band
The Standup
Fast, cheerful and upstroked, with a whole room shouting the hook back. Comic and rhyme-heavy, but the joke always lands on a real point, and it mocks the ritual rather than the people.
None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.
Where the words came from
The lyrics were written from the post HL7 ORU Messages Explained: Observation Results.
ORU messages deliver clinical results — pathology, radiology reports and observations — back to the systems and clinicians who need them. Here is how result messages are structured, and why corrections and preliminary results cause most of the trouble.