The Thessaliad Redux

dodgyhoodoo tends to complain about Thursdays. Thursday, for him, is the new Monday, a la Arthur Dent ("I never got the hang of Thursdays"). Some days, my Thursdays are similar. Today is one of those days.

There are certain things that I more or less balk at having to do. I have, in the space of two weeks or so, cleared a backlog of four months. That's what I can do if people let me just sit down and type. The sensible thing would be to let me sit down and type and have the people who are sitting next to the notes (two floors below where I am now, incidentally) do the printing and filing and everything. It shouldn't take long.

But no. No, apparently I am supposed to either go downstairs and gather all the notes I need, bring them back up here (so the notes aren't there when the loudmouths from MedRec turn up to dig for notes), type, file and then bring them down ... or type for the day, sort things into clinics, bring the letters downstairs and spend a half-hour down there filing them into the notes. There is no room for the latter and the former is ridiculous! I suppose I'll have to do the filing when the secretaries downstairs aren't around - like, get in earlier and/or stay later. Fuuuuck.

I hate working up here. It's at least relatively quiet but sharing the printer with a dozen other people is not fun. Particularly not when it requires rebooting every few hours and no one takes their documents out of the tray when it's done printing straight away. So one's letters end up jumbled with other letters and clinical governance documents and gods know what else and it all becomes one huge mess.

I will be so glad to be out of here. However, despite my apparent 'lack of communication' (how the hell am I supposed to communicate with them if they won't communicate with me about exactly what they want?), they want me here until January. While it's nice to know where I'll be for that length of time (though something tells me that I'm going to be working right up to Christmas Eve and coming back straight after Boxing Day...), I just want to be someplace else. Where I have an actual office. *sigh*

I will go home. I will have video-game-related stabnation. Things will improve. But that won't happen for two and a half hours. Fuuuuuuuuck

I am having One Of Those Days.

I was late for work owing to the more-or-less standard public transport woes. I guess it froze last night, to judge by the salt scattered all over the train platform this morning. Anyway, I wasn't very late, so that was alright. Still, not a great way to start the day, particularly when you have no idea what desk you're going to end up sitting at when you get in. (I know more or less what department I'm working in until mid-January. What I don't know is exactly where I'll be sitting on any given day.) As it happened, the other float temp wasn't in so I was offered her desk. However, I figured that it would be just my luck if she turned up while I was mid-letter, so I declined and took the desk of the IT guy who sits across from her desk instead. Unfortunately, there is only one foot pedal for our shiny new digital dictation machine, so I nabbed that.

Well ... I nabbed that after I got my computer access back.

Yeah, imagine my shock when I tried to log in and got beeped at with an error message saying that this user account had expired. Apparently, IT got really confused when my job spec went wibbly and I ended up doing the typing for half the damn hospital. Or they mistook me for one of the temps that float through the place sometimes. I honestly don't know. Either way, they somehow thought that my contact was ending and pulled the plug on my account on Friday night. So ... that was a truly unpleasant surprise, about which I thankfully got immediate reassurance. Things got settled on that end ... mostly ... except that I'm now having some issues with my EPR account that IT hasn't sorted out because EPR helpdesk is a separate department, which is traditionally staffed by lazy twits. But at least I can more or less type.

Unfortunately, the other secretary can't. Look, we have exactly one foot pedal up here. Headphones we have in plenty because there are still some of the old transcription machines kicking around (because, despite us having gone live with digital dictation over a month ago now, some of the consultants still refuse to use it altogether and so we have to make special allowances for tapes, because consultants are Speshul Snowflakes and anyone who's trying to maximise the efficiency of the NHS really needs to crack down on that bullshit, JUST SO YOU KNOW), but that doesn't work for the footpedals. I found my colleague trying to plug a foot pedal from a transcription machine into the microphone jack of her computer. Then she wandered away and found one that would fit an old-fashioned pin socket. Which our computers don't actually have anymore, given that I think those gave way to USB ports about five years ago and not even the NHS is that bad about updating its equipment. Sometimes. Mostly. Anyway, point is that she is boned. And if she hadn't had a worse time on public transport than I did, that'd be me.

The only cup of coffee I could get this morning was some incredibly disgusting instant. We were out of sugar so I had to use someone's artificial sweetener, which only made it worse. My tiny bag of dried apricots was not suitable for breakfast and it's at least an hour 'til lunch. I have a headache. My knees are really feeling the change in weather, as are my sinuses. I am tired and unhappy and I want to go hooooooooooome. And one of the doctors not only cannot figure out that he needs to hit the record button before he starts talking, but also has not yet worked out that the digital dictation system means that you have to dictate each letter as a separate sound file. So I'm going to look real forward to formatting this sucker when I finally get this sucker typed.

[Edit: Also, when I have cleared out three months of your typing backlog, do not turn around to me with bitch-face and tell me not to do your typing anymore because you don't need the help. Not when I have managed to clear the backlog that you've been leaving sitting there since June because you've been too busy reading the Metro or talking too loudly to your colleagues to actually do a damn thing. And this is the woman who bitches about how coming in on weekends isn't worth the overtime she gets! I don't even know what the hell she does! Argh!]

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?

Talking faster on your dictation tapes will not make us type faster, and certainly will not make us type more accurately while we're typing faster. And if your words are quite literally getting jumbled in your mouth because you're trying to speak with the speed of an auctioneer, you're wasting your own time as well as ours because you have to go back and correct your sentence. Plus this is putting your pronunciation all over the map.

In short: MORE HASTE, LESS SPEED, plxkthnxbai.

So I've been quiet for awhile, beyond the occasional rant. It's probably about time to rant about work, and why I need a new job, like, yesterday.

My co-admin was supposed to be leaving for greener pastures in September; something about having a job offer for something more in his skill set with a delayed start date. September came and went ... and there he was, still. Something about how he suddenly didn't have a start date anymore, but mentioned something November. Then January. It seems that the plan is that he's going to stick around until such time as they give him a date. Which, given how much they keep pushing it back, is going to be about half past never.

Senior management has always had a view to turning this particular admin job into a one-secretary operation. That secretary was supposed to be me, but since I'm still sort of in this 'float secretary' twilight zone and he's the 'official' secretary, and he's sticking around ... well, there have been reshuffles. I still have a job, but it is killing me by inches. See, I've been moved into a new department and the person whose long-term sick leave I'm covering for the moment left a complete unholy mess. I keep getting phone calls about appointments that should have been made months ago but weren't, letters that should have been typed but haven't been (the backlog went back to late August, pity's sake; I've spent the week whittling it down to mid-October and we might - might be into November by day's end), and messages that should have been passed on but clearly weren't, since nothing ever got done and the patient heard nothing back. So I get yelled at by patients a lot, particularly since IT has ballsed up my system access with the move and I can't actually make the appointments, and Central Bookings is staffed by baboons.

And then there are the people I share my current office space with. Look, I don't mind office chatter; I never have. Well, not usually. But when it's loud and I'm trying to type a clinic letter for a registrar who won't speak above a Scottish-accented mutter and trying to puzzle out medical terminology out of the mush over the noise, it doesn't help. Neither does the blaring of Heart 106.2 in the background; I like background music but I think one of the girls in the office is partly deaf, because it's right by her ear and she still cranks it. Plus I have discovered over the last week that these women are the sort who are perfectly happy to have Demi's divorce on the front page of the paper and yet bitch about celebrity culture. I can't help listening because it is too damn loud, and it all makes me want to throttle people.

(Also, if you want the window that is right by my left arm open, ask me if I mind before you do it. Do not lean over me, open the window and wander off. Particularly not when I told you just yesterday that sitting in a blast of cold air knots my muscles to the point of agony. ARGH.)

I've been in early and out late with minimal lunch for the last week. This looks set to continue in future. I need OUT. OUUUUUUUT.

But, yes, as mitchy points out, there are a few little cheery things, like late lunch at Belgos tomorrow. (Though I thought we were doing dinner? Eh, food and good company, and I can still lie in until at least midday.) Also slaughtering things in DA2; I'm doing the Rogue playthrough again because it's fun, in a "Waitaminit; the battle just started, where did all the enemies go? Oh, they're corpses on the floor already" sort of way. It's also at least in part research; I have this plot nug and it's turning into the longest fanfic I've written in over ten years and the longest DA fic I've written ... well, ever. It's turning into chapters and that is kind of scary and I don't really know about showing it to anyone, ever but DAMNIT, I AM GOING TO TRACK DOWN THAT UNHOLY PLOT NUG AND I WILL SLAY IT LIKE IT WAS AN ARCHDEMON!

*ahem* Right. Back to work. But fuck it, sometimes I just need a damn break and I can't hear my current clinic tape over my desk-neighbour singing along with the atrocious pop on the radio anyway. When this song is over, I can probably actually get shit done...

I haven't been doing the NaNo thing this year; haven't really had the energy. No guilt. I'll write what I can when I can. For now, I think I'm owed some chill-time after having been so sick last month.

So I played through Dragon Age 2 as a Rogue instead of a Mage for once, as I think I mentioned. Finished the playthrough now, and did Legacy; just have Mark of the Assassin to go. The first few levels kind of bite for a dual-wield rogue, but it's so worth it by the time you get to, like, level 5. And then come the specialities. I ended up as Assassin/Shadow dual wield and man do battles go faster that way. Awesome tip for any DW Rogues out there: Stealth, sneak up to the nearest mage, Assassinate, Backstab or Twin Fangs if required. Take the mages out quick and clean and right at the start so you don't have to chase the fucker around the place when s/he does that mini-teleport bullshit or wait out the force field. (Especially when dealing with saarebas; some of their spells are nasty.) Also, the cutscenes for killing things like the high dragon, or Corypheus ... soooooooo much more awesome as Rogue. So ... yeah, that was fun. Will have to do that again. Trying to ponder my best party for Mark of the Assassin too; Fenris is my go-to warrior but I have to decide whether I want an archer (Varric) or a mage (probably Bethany).

Still not doing the sneak bullshit in Castle Hate. Noooooo.

Also have a plotbunny hopping around in my head for DA2 fic as a result of this newest discovery of "Rogue = awesome". Probably best not to ask ... at least 'til I inflict it on you.

I've still been on Warcrack, but really only in fits and spurts. Still working on my Belf Pally, who's now got to the point where she can have dual-spec proper. So now she's a Prot/Ret Pally and kicking arse in Grizzly Hills, because I can't be bothered with doing heavier, more level-appropriate shit. Still pondering soloing the lower-level dungeons just to say I did 'em. But for the time being it's mostly Grizzly Hills and various dailies. It's a slow way to level but it works.

Soooooooo glad it's the weekend. I can just relax and veg and play video games and unwind from hell-week. Hooray, unwinding!

The banks, they make me livid.

Look, here's the thing. Letters from Inland Revenue are scary ... usually. So when I opened up my mail earlier this week, including the scary letters from Inland Revenue, imagine my utter shock when it turned out that they were giving me money. And I don't just mean 'I won ten quid on the lottery; let's get fish and chips with it' money, either. I'm talking a little over £450, 'Fuck's sake, be sensible and don't buy that iPod classic you've been drooling over for a year' money. So I get my nice shiny cheque/postal order thing from Inland Revenue, huzzah!

So I take this money to my bank. My bank puts it in my account. Ostensibly, anyway. I check my balance next day - because this is a postal order, not a cheque per se, and should clear pretty quickly, and if it doesn't ... well, no harm in looking, right? It says MONEY. So I go to use said money. Except that the cash machine tells me that I cannot access this money. Apparently, despite the fact that the bank is saying that this money is in my account, I can't have it. Apparently it hasn't cleared yet.

Then why the fuck are you telling me that it's in my account?

...Oh right; you want the interest, you fuckers.

Look, I get that they want to make sure that the money that is going to happen is ... y'know, going to happen before they give it to me. I understand that; I really do. But to say that this money is in my account when it isn't is absolutely fucking ludicrous. If my cheque has not cleared, do not tell me that my account has the funds that it would have if my cheque has cleared. If you are telling me that I have this money, let me have this fucking money, okay? It's not rocket science.

This is probably one of those first world problem things, but I don't actually care. Half the problem with this economy seems to be that people are finding ways to make imaginary money for themselves, and holding on to someone else's money to gain a piddling few pence worth of interest is part of that. Can we just have a clear-cut system whereby things move in a logical way? Like, people are not told that they have funds until those funds are available? Is that so hard?

It doesn't actually help that the staff at the bank branch I visited to check on this matter on Thursday were ... well, okay, the greeters at the door were nice, but I think that's because that's what they're there for; the friendly smiling icing on the turd cupcake that is over-the-counter banking. Because the guy I talked to about this a) didn't crack a smile, b) talked to me like I was about six and c) basically said, "Yes, it says you have this money but you don't; try on Tuesday" without so much as a 'sorry for the confusion'. Even if it's not meant, you could at least say it. I have to apologise for shit that isn't my fault and I'm not genuinely sorry for because it's company (read: NHS) policy all the time! A certain consultant only wants my co-admin to handle appointment bookings and I'm on the phones because it's Friday and some patient is screaming at me to book them an appointment RightThisSecondNow? Maybe I'm not sorry because the patient (or, more often, the patient's relative) is being an arsehole, but I'll say it. Gods, is a little tiiiiiiny bit of politeness too much to ask for? It's not like I was asking for the moon; I was asking for clarification on a matter, nothing more. And the question of "How do I know when these funds have actually reached my account so that if I do decide to make a purchase for an amount greater than the funds that are currently in my account, taking into consideration that it says these funds are in my account but apparently aren't, I don't get horrifically embarrassed" should not be met with a sullen shrug and no response at all. Apparently it's perfectly reasonable to have someone check their available balance on a local ATM every day until it states that they have X money available, because of course no one hates it when people waste time faffing about on the ATM ahead of them when they just want to take out a tenner to buy lunch with the half-hour they've got for their lunch break. Apparently it's reasonable to let customers not know how much money they really have available in their accounts because their actual balance says one thing and the ATM says another. It's a damn good thing I didn't need that money particularly or I'd have been fucked.

Anyway, that said, it looks like Tuesday was pushing things a bit. Maybe. I have a habit of sticking most available funds into my flexi-saver account and transferring out what bits I need week to week, so that I don't spend too much. So I didn't actually have the funds necessary to, in this case, buy Sims 3 Pets without that cheque clearing. I decided to try the card purchase again (I download these things via Origin these days; it's easier, and this way I don't have even potential embarrassment of 'your card has been declined' from a human being, and as a way to ensure that there is money it beats the hell out of yomping down the road in the cold and grey for what might be a total waste of time) and it actually went through. So ... I maybe have my awesome tax rebate money. It certainly likes my card now, which it didn't on Thursday. I probably will have to go to the ATM and double-check this later, but that can double with my trek out for supplies (for which I have cash money) so it won't be a wasted trip even if I can't get cash out from the ATM. Which would be really stupid, seeing as Origin likes my debit card, but I am putting nothing past my bank right now.

Soooooo ... anyway, Sims 3 Pets! I'll stop bitching now...

With apologies to tempus_teapot for stealing her idea of condensing her Tuesday plot nug drabble stuff into one post on a ... well, Thursday, now. But if I'm going to write fic, I may as well start owning up to it again. Plus it's easier to keep track of what I've written that way than it is to randomly tack them into my Memories and dig them out of the comments (though I do that too, if only to remind myself what went where when and it's always fun to reread other people's stuff too).

( Surprise Party )

( Piles of Paperwork )

( Say Anything )

In other news, slept badly, still lurgified, and am getting horrified over on Tumblr about the whole deal about The Mists of Pandaria. If they're going to give us a playable race of Kung-Fu Pandas, they could at least try to throw a spin on it somewhere. Tauren have Mulgore, Worgen have Gilneas, and Pandarens have ... Pandaria. And there are to be pet battles. I subscribed to Warcraft, not Pokemon. *sigh* The expansions have gone "Azeroth -> beating back demons in Outland -> beating back the pissed-off undead in Northrend -> beating back a pain-maddened warder of the earth itself with the entire world cracking under one's feet -> ...pandas and pokeballs", so maybe I shouldn't be surprised this is a letdown.

Now, lemme just crawl back under my duvet and die for a couple of days.

Right; about time I started posting again. Partly because the Dragon Age friending meme has turned up on one of the fan communities again and there's whole bunches of new people. Hi, folks! I may actually subject you to fanfic at some point; sorry. *g*

Okay, someone please explain Tumblr to me? Because I keep hearing about this thing and I really don't get it. I have my Twitter feed and I'm a recovering Facebook game addict, but Tumblr, while I keep hearing it around, is Greek to me. From what little I can gather, it's like a combination of Twitter and Blogger or something. But I honestly do not know.

This weekend has been largely devoted to being curled up in bed watching Criminal Minds. Currently on S2 again. I had to look up the name James Van der Beek and when I did, I flashed back to A-level era summertime weekday afternoon TV and realised that the guy who played Dawson actually has acting chops if he can play serial killer with dissociative identity disorder that well. Also, between that two-parter and S3 of True Blood, it seems that acting chops run in the Swayze family, as does that very distinctive eye shape and jawline. And the makeup job on Jane Lynch is phenomenal, given the promo shots I've seen of her in Glee. This is a game I play; the 'I've Seen That Face/Heard That Voice Before' IMDB game. It's how I know that I've actually seen Gideon Emery (Primeval) and thus will recognise him at the MCM Expo next weekend. I make my own fun. *g*

The rest of the weekend ... Dragon Age, mostly. I finally got through Mark of the Assassin ... though not in the way that earns one a particular sneaky-play-related achievement. ( Cut for spoilers goes here and... )

Anyway, after that, I went back to Origins to work on some favoured playthrough stuff. Sometimes the savegen that the fans came up with just doesn't work as well as I'd like. So I'm working the Dalish Elf origin right now, because the standard one they give you is actually reeeeeeeally close to my headcanon but not quite close enough. I've just got out of Lothering so I've got a ways to go yet but I've also got an Elven Mage playthrough I want to work on. There just aren't enough hours in a day.

*sigh* Sunday evening. There needs to be more weekend, damnit.

There is nowhere near enough weekend. Just sayin'.

So I got the shopping in on Saturday. That went well - I remembered to get all the stuff I'll need to pack a lunch at work, I got breakfast bars so I won't starve in the mornings because a half-hour bit of sleep wins over breakfast every time, I got food for the week. I feel accomplished about this because last week I was mainly reduced to picking up something vaguely dinner-like on my way home in the evenings because I just did not have the energy to do a full week's shopping. So ... yeah. House full of food. Which is awesome. There's going to be spaghetti bolognaise and sausage hotpot in my future, but this weekend was lamb breast and pork belly slices (Saturday and Sunday respectively) with corn on the cob and butternut squash. Nom.

Did some Warcrackery, but mostly it wasn't the typical "go out and kill things for quests" thing. I dug up ruins for my Archaeology secondary, and did a lot of mining in the process, which was pretty much below my current level so I put all of that up for auction. That's been working out well so far. Also did a few daily quests (more profession stuff, mostly, except for the one where my toon got to ride a freakin' dragon into battle) and crawled through a quest chain or two. It's not specifically what I'd call 'having a life', but it'll do in a pinch.

But then there will be tomorrow and I will have to go back to work. Weekends are too short. Again, just sayin'.