The Thessaliad Redux

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?

I'm not sure where the gibbons are - Royal Mail, the local NHS Trust central appointments office or the local NHS Trust hospital's post room. I'm not home yet; I haven't seen a doctor yet. I am in the local library (where I had to go to return some books anyway, but still), which at least have free internet facilities, to give an update on the gibbons.

I turned up at the hospital and found main outpatients with 20 minutes to spare. Go, me. As I arrived, some lady was being told that her appointment had been rescheduled and they'd tried to tell her but she'd recently moved and her address hadn't been changed on the system yet. I had no sense of foreboding whatsoever as I handed in my appointment letter and said I had a 10am appointment. I should have had, really, because the next thing that happened was the receptionist telling me that my appointment had been rescheduled. For yesterday. I don't know why the totally random reschedule - no one bothered to tell me - but what they told me was that they'd typed up a letter on 3rd March that never got to me. Yeah. That's helpful. So like I say, I don't know where the gibbons are. Anyway, since it was a new appointment and I got marked as Did Not Attend through no fucking fault of my own, a DNA letter got sent to my GP and they removed me from the system. And according to the receptionist on duty, the earliest they could fit me in again was July.

I swear, I nearly cried. I tried not to give the staff a hard time, but I did have to explain that I had been going through this for months, there have been Casualty trips and I could not wait another two months to be seen because my situation was deteriorating in a quick and worrisome way. Thankfully, the secretary who was called on to pull up my notification-of-reschedule letter was very nice and basically told me that she would see what she could do to get me seen today. There's always one, I suppose, to make up for the receptionist who just wants people to go away, from the look of her. In any case, in the meantime, a nurse took my blood pressure and so on to get it out of the way in case I could be seen that day and I was told to wait.

And so I waited. And waited. And waited. And watched the receptionist and the secretary converse with what I assume to be some sort of doctor (registrar, probably - too young to be a SHO and certainly too young for a consultant, which I only say because he looked about half my age). The receptionist took the line of, "She has another appointment! Everyone's busy!" and the secretary took my side. Long story short? I have an appointment with the registrar at 2pm today. By that point, there was no point whatsoever in going home, so I hung around Barnet for a bit, and now have to head back so that I can make my hard-won appointment. I'm tired, hungry and all-around miserable, and I hope this whole rigamarole was worth it.

*voom*

It's been one of those days. One of those miserable, forsaken days that you really want to just wipe off the bloody calendar. Mercury. Fucking. Retrograde.

Got into the office thinking, "This will be a good day. Lunch with yshala, bank run on the way, no problem." However, my early afternoon got completely scuppered by an unexpected team meeting (I've been there two days and I'm technically a temp! AUGH! We spent hours going over a bit of NHS policy they were talking about implementing when I was back at St Barts lo these many years ago, for pity's sake!) and I didn't have yshala's phone number to tell her. I emailed Daz (copying her in so she'd at least know I tried) and wound up spending the rest of the day running around like a headless chicken or stuck in meetings and IT training. I got the bank run done but sacrificed the whole 'actually eating lunch' thing to do it, and the one tape I managed to get done ... well, I didn't get to finish it because some yahoo of a SHO decided that I could quite easily pull a patient's details up to type a Did Not Attend letter with nothing but a date of birth - no hospital number, no patient name, nothing. Man, I was so glad when the workday ended and I could go home...

But of course, that didn't go well either. The train stopped at Camden Town for awhile, during which we were told that there was signal failure at Highgate and East Finchley (both of 'em! At once!) and therefore would be significant delays while they 'harmonised the service'. Which meant sitting at Camden for ten minutes, then chugging along a ways before being informed that, to 'harmonise the service', the train I was on would be terminating at Archway. Juuuuuust brilliant. Then, of course, after another ten minutes of hovering on the platform at Archway, I discover that the next train is heading for Mill Hill East rather than High Barnet as previously stated. Again, 'harmonising the service'. Some time after that, I finally got on my packed Tube home.

There was nice dinner that I tried to appreciate despite the flat and the headache and the rampant screaming bleeeh. But tonight? Oh gods, this has to be a bullshit-free night.

Yesterday didn't go particularly well towards the end...

I'll begin with about a fortnight ago, when I got called into my line manager's office and told that I really ought to email the people I do my PA work for to let them know that I have done the things they've asked me to do. Now, as someone who's pretty used to working on her own initiative, that's somewhat counter-intuitive - surely my employers, who laud my technical skills and proactivity, should trust that I am going to do what they ask of me, and that I will pass along any details of that as are appropriate but otherwise will just get on with the work. However, as I was asked to start confirming that I was doing my job regularly, I did as requested, sending emails confirming that a task was done when a task was done. What else was there to do?

Cue two weeks later - yesterday. The day started off pretty normally. There were tasks. I did them. I emailed people to let them know that the tasks were done when the tasks were done. I pried some information out of my just-back-from-holiday line manager, who seemed happy to see me and content that things were well and under control. Matters progressed throughout the day until I had nothing much left to do.

Then my line manager walks in, looking really subdued, and informing me that I have to report to Personnel. It's never a good thing when one has to report to Personnel. Honestly, though, I thought it was something to do with my apparently missing Occupational Health form that was posted to the Royal Free but may, I suspect, have been lost owing to the postal strikes that were happening at the time I sent it. So I wasn't particularly worried, but there was a little bit of trepidation about how my formerly smiley and personable line manager wouldn't even look at me on the way down to Personnel, much less talk to me. It wasn't that 'I am very disappointed in you; you have done a bad bad thing' silence, though, so I didn't think much of it.

Basically, it was a 'walking the last mile' thing, as I discovered when I sat down in the Personnel Director's office and said Personnel Director told me that, while my technical skills were brilliant, I wasn't communicating to the senior managers enough in terms of what I was getting done, so they weren't renewing my probation period and I might as well leave the building and the job right then.

Long story short: despite the fact that I get my job done and do so quite well, because I work on my own initiative and have only recently started flooding my senior managers' email in-boxes with pithy emails telling them that yes, I have done my job, I got sacked.

My line manager was horrified and apparently very surprised. No one else knew a damn thing about it, to judge by the reaction of the one person I got to say good-bye to. I seriously doubt whether my senior managers know a damn thing about this, to judge from their emails to me yesterday (boy, are they in for a shock). And frankly, it makes no sense. Ask me to do a thing right towards the end of my probation period, and then don't extend the probation period to make absolutely sure it's going according to plan, with an employee that they've admitted is a fantastic PA? Of course, it's possible that they just want to revisit the payband on that role and can't do that as effectively when someone's in the role on a permanent basis, but on the whole, I'm just not going to bother doing the conspiracy theory thing.

There's also, of course, the little matter of now being unemployed. Again. I've got my last paycheque coming in (including payment in lieu for the annual leave I never took and I wonder if I'm supposed to be getting notice - that never became clear but generally speaking one gets at least some notice period before the sacking, though admittedly that might be different in a probation period) so that's a month's worth of leeway, and with everyone going back to uni and stuff, there should be some temp roles kicking about the place. Today, however, is a mental health day. I just can't face the idea of bouncing right back up and ringing agencies today. Too much stress and confusion and argh.

Instead, I'm going to find something that vaguely resembles lunch, sit down in front of Buffy or something for a couple of hours and pull out Transmetropolitan. Spider Jerusalem really helps at times like these.

Well, we tried pulling out a stick of the RAM I'm currently running. Matters improved for all of two minutes before the crawl began again. Basically, consensus is the motherboard is going to hell. This theory is backed up by the constantly borking or vanishing F drive, the iTunes skippage and general mishegoss of that nature. Which means that I need the damn thing replacing. Fair enough - it's dodgyhoodoo's old motherboard, it's seen use, it's old and these things happen.

However. I can't afford to replace the motherboard. I particularly can't afford to replace the graphics card as well as the motherboard, which I'll probably have to do as the newer motherboards probably won't run the older graphics card. So basically, FFXI and Sims 2 will have to go hang until I can afford to replace what amounts to my entire system. Given the fact that I need to start setting up a nest-egg for the next unemployment horror (I'm a temp; it's going to happen one day), I won't actually be able to afford it. At all. Look, having enough money to contribute to the rent and suchlike is far more important than some stupid game. Or so I keep telling myself in a bid to keep from feeling utterly and completely miserable about the whole fucking situation.

After all, it's not like I'm ever going to be completely without computer access. If the motherboard on the Frankenbox dies completely, I have iMisc. My favourite tunes are on iStress, and it's not like I've been using iTunes on this machine anyway because of the whole skipping problem. And the stuff that I have to run on a PC isn't running so if I had to switch to iMisc as my primary computer, all I'd be losing is a decent keyboard and mouse. I can manage, and I suppose I'm going to have to.

I'm tired of most of my life being nothing more than 'managing'. I was coping a whole lot better when I had things to look forward to when I got home. Interior design. Monster nukage. That kind of thing. Now, though, I crawl through the shitstorm that is my day, I go home, I sleep until dinner, I eat, I chat to friends briefly, I very occasionally RP, and then I go to bed. Then I get up and do it all over again. My weekends are now pretty much just recovery time from hell-week - getting my back into halfway decent shape to survive another five days sitting in the horrible chair. It's depressing.

But I'll manage. I'm going to have to manage. It's not a permanent situation. Something'll come up so I can get a new motherboard. If nothing else, it's nine months 'til Christmas. And a hard-excavated streak of optimism is all that's keeping me remotely sane right now.

Apparently, 'tis the fucking season.

I got the following email today:

( Dear writer, you owe me fanfic! )

This was my reply:

( Dear fangirl: Until I'm being paid for this, I don't owe you a damn thing. )

Thankfully, the one who wanted to use my characters has said that she won't post any of the stuff she writes on any sites, and I'm not going to stop her from writing it so long as it doesn't go out anywhere. She also asked if there's any hope for her as a writer, and I really don't know what to say. There's a lack of comic timing and subtlety in her work, and she doesn't really pay all that much attention to the characters' voices from what little of it I actually read. So I'm putting off answering that one for awhile.

Why? Why do these things happen?

I am waiting for painkillers to kick in. Because hey, guess what? The headache has still not gone away despite the lion's share of yesterday spent languishing in bed. Bully for me! It's not like I'm tired or anything; sure, I may have only got a few hours during the night, but given I slept for six hours yesterday during the daytime, I think it pretty well evens out. If I didn't have the fucking headache and associated nausea, I would actually feel fairly well, I think. But I don't. Instead, I have the miserable headache and Ham-Fisted Editor is in today and it's just going to be messy if I don't turn up but I somehow can't see myself taking any of that shit today. So I'm sitting here waiting for painkillers to kick in and judging my ability to complete a sentence while still contemplating calling in sick again.

...I don't wanna call in sick, but neither do I want to go to work feeling like someone is napalming my brain! Now I have The Guilt! dodgyhoodoo says this ought to take a back seat to The Head Explody, and I know he's right (though I note he's never that sensible about himself), but it still leaves The Guilt. I'm just glad I haven't called in sick in awhile (well, in a month, but it was still just the one day back in August with the gut horror). And it's a new year employment-wise, so hopefully I shouldn't get into too much shit for being ill.

Now, if the cat would just shut up for two minutes...

And the suck just keeps on coming as I spend yet another Friday taking shit for things that are not my fault.

See, we had this paper that arrived in late January. This paper was too long by our guidelines, so I told them to cut it shorter and send it again if they chose to, then moved on to other things. Then went on my birthday holiday, came back, and still thought nothing of that particular too-long paper (one of the many, you understand) until exactly a week ago, when I got an email asking what had become of their paper. Of course, it's now nearly eight months later so I don't actually remember thing one about this paper, so I look it up. And as I look, I see that yes, on 9 February, we - meaning Michael, as I was out of the office at the time - did send confirmation of receipt of that paper. But did I see a printout when I arrived? No. Did I see the email to which Michael was replying? No. Did I have any clue what to say that wasn't going to look like backstabbing my boss? NO. So I cited 'administration error', explained that we didn't seem to have the paper, apologised profusely and asked them to send it again. Which they did. And it's being worked on. So not great, but at least that's better than it could be, right?

Except for the fact that there's this other paper that turned out to, despite having apparently been accepted, dropped off the planet. Apparently there was at one point a serious hiccup between me and copy editing. No, I don't remember whose fault it was - this was months ago. What I do know is that the stupid paper should have been forwarded to copy editing but apparently, no such thing occurred. Either that or copy editing lost the damn paper, and of course I'd gone through an email "Accepted Papers" purge so I have no proof that it got sent at all. Fuck. Me. So I have to, yet again, turn around to authors and cite 'administration error' (which always, always, ALWAYS means me) so I can get the final version of the fucking paper again.

Except that the corresponding author of that second paper is the same as the corresponding author of the first one, and someone who we work with closely and like to keep happy wherever possible. And now the final version's been sent to me, but is attached to this letter going on about how there is concern about our (read: my) organisational skills. And Michael gave me the blankest, dumbest stoned-cow look when he asked for an explanation of that first paper and I had to tell him that he was the last one to deal with it and seems to have somehow lost it while I was away. "That's odd," he says. "First thing I generally do with these things is check the word length. You'd have thought..." Like it couldn't possibly be to do with him at all. Like it doesn't matter that he's supposed to get the benefit of the doubt and I'm not.

I'm supposed to send emails to people who don't seem to exist and the spelling of whose names I can't trust (so what's the point of even looking?!?). I'm supposed to somehow know when other people have fucked up around here. There is no way that I need this bullshit today.

And so continues the cavalcade of SUCK.

Word from the office is that, since I've already had 14 sick days since the start of the year, there are serious problems and it all needs to be 'discussed'. I don't know what there is to discuss, frankly; there is nothing I can do about this. I got bronchitis earlier this year. Last month I had tonsillitis. This month ... same thing. I don't know how to stop getting sick; I can bundle up and eat my veggies and all that good shit, and I do. However, if the lurgy wants me, the lurgy is going to have me, and there's not a lot I can do to stop it. So now I have lurgy with added stress and, while I was too sick to go to the doctor today (it's that horrible in-between point of ill health where you're too ill to move and not ill enough for an ambulance), I will have to go in tomorrow and while I'm there, I will also have to ask if there's any way of getting some kind of note pointing out that I did go to the doctor for these things and that my illness was in no way malingering. It's the only thing I can think to do because frankly, at this point, I'm at the end of my tether. I wasn't ill for so long in any of those individual cases that I didn't qualify for self-certification, but I was genuinely ill, and honestly, what else can you really say? "I'm sorry; I should obviously have dragged myself in anyway, infected half the office with it so that productivity takes a real nose-dive and wound up ill for weeks instead of days"?

Great. Stress on top of illness. That's going to get me better quicker, isn't it? Fuckit; doctor tomorrow and the rest of the week in bed. I can't see myself getting properly better before then and if I'm going to get shit for minding my own health, then I'm not going to make the effort to come in while still horribly ill just because they're bitching at me.

Besides, the beginning of the year was five months ago! If it was within a month, like it was at Kier, I could understand, but ... argh!

It's Meet the Parents Week!

Well, really. Tonight, drinks with my mother. Thursday, dinner with dodgyhoodoo's. Argh. Argh. Streeeeeess.

Oh well. I will be content. There's all that time off, and I need to plug in iStress to give it a bit of charge, maybe feed it weaselbitch's Portishead album (I'd completely forgotten about this album and how much I liked it!), get dressed, brush my hair, and then head off to do a bit of shopping and then meet dodgyhoodoo for a drink at the Intrepid Fox before meeting Mum for a drink at trendy coffee wine bar place.

Gleep.