Raaaaaaage...

I need a day off. I need a day off. I need a day off so badly I CANNOT STAND IT.

(Thankfully, it is the weekend so I get two. But it doesn't feel like enough.)

The good news is I am no longer standing in for the secretary that doesn't do a damned thing. No, instead I am helping yet another department with yet another backlog - this one dating as far back as June. Well. August now (because I frankly rock). Except that IT didn't give me access to the part of the system I needed to access and no one told me where to save what when anyway, and nobody told me exactly how things work in that department so things got messy. See, apparently these doctors do not like looking at computer screens ... or dealing with computers at all, given their inability to log things onto the shiny new digital dictation system correctly so that I still get all manner of letters with no idea who I'm typing about... Anyway, point is that they won't verify letters on the system. No, they make it a lot more complicated. They make us finalise the letters on the system so we can print them out, check the printouts over for errors, and then make us leave any corrections that might need making on the system while we correct and print out an entirely separate copy on the shared drive. This is insane, but never mind. At least I now relatively have the hang of things so I can just get on with typing.

Well ... mostly. There are issues. See, there's not enough room in the office of the department for whom I am doing backlog duty for me to actually have office space there. I'm up in the managerial suite for my typing. The printer's inconvenient; not only do I share it with about eight other people (none of whom are keen to take their printed documents out of the printer, for some reason, so they just sit there and clutter up the place) but it's sitting in a corner being blocked by a co-worker and a large floor-standing electric fan. My desk is an ergonomic nightmare and my back is to a corridor, which is less than fun. And I have to go down three flights of stairs and halfway across the hospital to drop off my printed-out documents ... in the opposite direction of anywhere I might actually find lunch. And as unpleasant as my current office space is, it's better than what I might have Monday, since this department wants to keep me for a few weeks longer but also has to give this desk to the other poor slob helping with this department's backlog. So they want me to come in at half-past sparrowfart Monday morning as usual but aren't entirely sure they'll have a desk for me to work at when I do.

This is why I spend most of my evenings doing little more than play Dragon Age 2. There is nothing more satisfying after a day of this shit than hitting lowish-level mobs with Assassinate and watching them explode.

Who votes I have a really nice dinner tonight?

Memory Lane

I haz a meme. kelemvor givez it me. And he gave me age 17. TEENAGE ANGST GO!

I was dating:
Expect this to be complicated; I was seventeen. Let's see. For most of it, I was dating Gopi Flaherty, who was a year above me in school and ended up going to college in Pennsylvania while I was doing my last year of A-levels. There was a lot of off-again, on-again, both during the long-distance phase and not. But at least he was a waaaaay better kisser than my age-16 boyfriend...

I wanted to be:
Ah, that was when the big sea change happened. For most of my life prior to that, I wanted to be a veterinarian - or, more specifically, a marine zoologist as decided when I was about ten. Age seventeen was around when I was slogging desperately through a Chemistry A-level and a Maths AS-level that I could not get to grips with at all and I realised that I was not really cut out for this 'science' thing. Of course, that was also around the time I started writing anything other than diary entries. I don't even remember why I started, though I'd been writing things for as long as I can remember. I think my mother still has my first clumsily-written stories and a few copies of the newspaper I wrote, illustrated and sold around her office when I was little. Anyway, that was the point at which I decided that I wanted to be a writer. Thankfully, when I put my mind to it, I took to typing a lot better than I did to maths.

In terms of anything other than future plans, I wanted to be away most of all. That was the year I begged my mother to let me be a boarding student at the school I was in at the time, citing 'I'll be able to focus on my studies better' as a reason. Really, I just couldn't take ... well, her and David, mostly. Having every aspect of my life controlled (right down to diet and exercise regime, thank you; 45 minutes on the exercise bike every day, gods-awful microwave diet meals for dinner, and let's not talk about the time I found my mother reading my diary and having her tell me that I didn't have the right to think that way about her...) got really old, really fast.

My best friend:
Ah, the dream team. The concept of a singular best friend was pretty freakin' difficult once I moved to the UK the year previous. Mostly I was hanging around with Louise Baxter, Bryony Watson and Finn Pollard at the time. I guess at the end of the day, Louise was the best friend, if I had to choose. If there's a female equivalent of the term 'epic bromance' ... that was us.

I lived:
In Letchworth, Hertfordshire. Specifically, in a not-too-bad room in the house owned by my mother and now-stepfather. Though again, if I could have lived at my school, I would have leapt at the opportunity. At least by then I'd been allowed to redecorate the horrid place; when I moved in, it was peach carpet and this hideous wallpaper. The peach carpet stayed but I got to paint the walls, at least. The furniture was cheap crap and I had little privacy, but it was a place to lay my head, anyway. I was not sorry to leave.

So ... who wants in on this meme-thing?