The doc told me to take it easy since recovery from pericarditis can take about a week after they start giving you medications, although truthfully I feel a lot better anyway. But freedom from stress as an adult is a lovely concept but unrealistic. We all have stresses. Everything from major job, money, health worries to the minor 'oh crap I just said something stupid on the interwebs' or 'damn I need to flame this arsehole in the worst way'.
Looking back on things though - in just about every occurance of the minor stresses, even including getting banned from forums for getting into a fight (I still maintain I was right), a few months down the line it's of no importance whatsoever. So I'm trying to look at things logically with regards how likely it is that the current stress can affect me or if it will even occur.
Paradoxically, the one thing I don't get stressed over is my health. I know it's crap, but I can't do anything about it, so why worry....
I've never known anyone with a thyroid problem so I'm not sure whether a diagnosis here would be a good thing or a bad thing. Advice from anyone appreciated.
It was probably one of the harder interviews I have ever gone through - quickfire questions about hypothetical scenarios and how I would deal with them, questions on technical skills, queries about how I've dealt with difficult situations in the past etc. By far the hardest though was explaining why I've had about 4 weeks total signed off work ill this year, which is rather a lot. However they did seem to be genuinely shocked to hear that most of that was due to the incident in March of me getting my head kicked in by a bunch of muggers, I did point out that that is the primary reason why I no longer want to work in London.
I am happy that I did the best I could, I asked relevant questions at the end and I remembered interview etiquette about eye contact, body language, making sure I spoke to all the interviewers and not just one, shaking hands and thanking them for their time. It just remains to be seen if I was better than the other people they interviewed. Fingers crossed I should find out on Monday or Tuesday whether I am going to be able to leave London behind for good.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Here’s how to really make friends with a third-line support team:
- Send us all calls to do with password resets and user queries about what that ‘funny black box on the desk’ is. We deal with complex issues every day and it’s nice to deal with the banal stuff.
- Insist you know more than us because you once looked up the name of the application on Google. I mean, that’s all we do after all….
- Sit on a call for 5 days and then assign it to us. We need the practise gained from our anger management courses to deal with irate users.
- Send us calls of ‘user has problem’. We like puzzles.
- Please do re-open calls that we have fixed just because you don’t think our solution could possibly have worked. We like second opinions.
- Assign us calls on 9pm Friday night and then bitch to our boss that it’s now Monday morning and we’ve not done anything. You don’t get to be 3rd Tier without having no life whatsoever.
- Keep escalating calls to do with one users copy of Excel not working. Those crashed servers we’re dealing with can wait anyway.
- Email our managers about why do we only close 4-5 calls a day when you deal with hundreds. We’re lazy and need the wakeup.
- Assign ANY and all calls directly to us without doing any troubleshooting first. We were just sitting here drinking tea all day anyway and nothing gives us more joy than finding out the user hadn’t powered the computer on.
- Log all tickets under ‘Windows Fault’. Since all the computers run on Windows it doesn’t matter the specific application.
(Yanked out of my head while my sister was doing my hair, with accompanying 'ha ha, you're OLD' jokes)
Went out to the shops just now and just got back with stuff for dinner and it wasn't until the fuel warning light came on in the car that I remembered what I had ORIGINALLY gone out for.
Petrol.
Damn.
- Music:Takahashi Youko - Cruel Angel Thesis | Powered by Last.fm
Someone at work today asked why we, as a company, had not done anything to remember the fallen of 11/9 (that's 9/11 if you write it in the US standard where you put the month first) and went on to preach about how by NOT standing up we were letting 'the terrorists win'.
I asked what he had done on 7/7. Why? Said he, what's so special about that date?
Oh, you know, only the city we work in was bombed by terrorists, killing people on the Underground and the London buses and causing major widespread disruption across the entire network. One of those bombs going off only a few hundred metres from our head office, which is itself only 5 minutes walk away from OUR building.
Oh. Said he. Well, that doesn't really matter so much, it's not like anyone remembers it.
I remember it.....
It wasn't the normal pain I am used to - this was spiking, stabbing, cramping horror. The doctor put me on some low dose valium for the week to ease it off and I returned to work on Friday.
This weekend I have been suffering with this, it got to be so bad today I borrowed some strong pain meds off my family, which has eased it off slightly. Now however, I am well aware that having been in this much pain I really do have to go back to the doctor tomorrow so he can figure out what has gone wrong and try something that is going to work. But I was off work most of last week and really do NOT want to take any more time off, I know my boss will be pissed if I'm not in tomorrow, he wanted to talk to me about my time off last week..
I don't know what to do.
Kitty in her more usual "you've got 20 seconds to get that camera out of my face before I rip you a new orifice" mood
Kitty in a sedate mood
The rest of the time I do shit I'll have to fix later.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great show, but it's somewhat jarring for me to see Hugh Laurie as anything other than his various characters in Blackadder...
1. Wesley Crusher /Screech (Saved by the Bell). Uber nerd slashfic.
2. Tarot / Anita Blake. Attack of the badly-written nymphos, see how many words you can get out before...oh god they're at it again.
3. Data / Marvin the Paranoid Android. WD-40 and servo-gear fetish anyone?
4. Jay and Silent Bob / Counsellor Troi. I have no idea where that idea came from.
Give me more ideas, if you have the stomach for it :p
Small guilty pleasures in life:
Seeing a fare dodger get forceably hauled off a train and dumped at a station 80 miles away from the one he wanted to get to…
Local neighbourhood teenage shits decide to blast out rap music at 120 million decibels (can seriously hear it perfectly half a mile down the road)
CD decides to go for a drive instead of confronting them.
While the article alone is rage-worthy enough, the comments I have seen elsewhere about that article have made me almost volcanic in rage. Some samples:
'If you are not in a wheelchair you are not disabled! If you find it hard to walk but still can then stop being so lazy'
'People get disabled permits just for saying they get tired easily, so if any lazy person can get one then too right this guy was challenged'
'Pain is not a disability. If you are in pain just get some meds from the doctor, don't try and make out like you have some kind of special handicap'
That last one is obviously written by someone who has no idea what chronic pain does to you. It is not like a headache where you take a pill, have a nap and feel better.
It's a never-ending pain. Knowing full well that no matter what medicine you take you are NEVER going to have a day in your life free from it again. You find yourself asking what the FUCK you did to deserve this, when you get to a day where even getting dressed reduces you to tears of agony and frustration. You look upon people who berate 'invisible disabilities' with barely contained contempt because you know damn well they've NEVER had a challenge greater than 'ooo, can I actually back my car out of this parking space without bashing my wing mirror?'. They might complain about blisters when they walk a few miles but they won't know the grinding agony from walking a few metres.
No we don't scream and cry the whole time, but that does not mean we are not in pain. Crying only gives you a fucking headache ON TOP of the rest of it.
What we need is some kind of empathy invention. You hook these judgemental fuckwits up to one end and on the other end you hook up a person with a severe pain problem. Download the pain from one to the other for a few hours. Benefit is the sufferer gets a few blissful hours free of the constant burden, and the judgemental fucker gets a full taste of just what the fuck it is like.
I bet you they'd not be quite so stupid afterward.
1. Get home, make cup of tea, realise kitchen is in a bit of a mess, clean kitchen
2. Wonder whether having a bath or shower would be better
3. While wondering about washing options, realise previous tea has gone cold, make another one
4. Find book that looks interesting while dusting the bookcase, sit and read book
5. Realise tea has gone cold again. Make another cup
6. Find interesting comic under coffee table, read comic for a few minutes then remember need to do hair
7. Get out hair straighteners, cleaning off dressing table first, find interesting book under table and have a read
8. Tea is now cold again, go and run bath while making another cup of tea
9. While making tea, find interesting magazine. Start reading. Eventually remember the bath is still running.
10. Have bath.
11. Tea has gone cold whilst in the bath, make more tea, power up computer, find interesting stuff on interwebs
12. It's now 10pm, haven't had any dinner, hair STILL isn't sorted and it's time to go to bed.
13. Go to bed, find more interesting books...
This routine (and ability to get distracted by ANY form of reading matter) explains why I've survived on 5 hours or less sleep a night for longer than I care to remember....
That is all.
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commanderd- Flarn-Munching Priestess of Z'Ha'Dum
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