The GirlAlive Blog

bacon

I can’t update my blog or check my email from work. They have not
given me internet access, which I guess is okay because some people who
download porn at work and spend all day on ebay screw it up for everyone.
So I’m writing this blog as an email to myself, which I will post when
I get home. (It’s my lunch hour. I’m not breaking rules.)

I woke up at 5:30 this morning because we took the blanket that has
been hanging over the bedroom window down. It was there because it was
too sunny to sleep when I was not working. Now that I am working, the
darkness was making it hard to get up in the morning. But I’m not used
to so much light, so I woke up at 5:30. So did my husband.

At that time of the morning, I didn’t feel like making myself a lunch.
So I bought my lunch from the shop in the hospital. I had a sandwich.
In the UK, that’s a huge decision, choosing a sandwich. In the US,
you’ll get a selection of highly questionable and overly moist sandwiches
that were very likely packed during the Nixon administration. They
tend to be things like "peanut butter and jelly", "ham and cheese" and
"the substance formerly known as egg salad". They should not be taken
internally, in the US. Here in the UK, packaged sandwiches are actually
quite good. They have bizarre but tasty combinations like "tuna and
sweetcorn" and the one I just had "brie and bacon". I should have gone
for the healthier "tuna and cucumber", but the bacon was just so tasty.

I have to get back to work. These charts won’t code themselves, I
guess.

Alana

Meconium

I’m starting to get used to the new job.  Today I even got to do some actual coding.  And I also eventually got my ID.  I’m still fighting to get things done.  I was supposed to have a workstation assessment because of the previous problems with my arms.  It hasn’t happened.  I need a new chair, but that won’t happen until occupation health does the assessment and demand it.

Aside from all the beurocratic crap, it’s going well.  My co-workers are very nice.  Some have worked in health records for as much as 20 years.  I’m the young one in the office, which is nice in light of the fact that I will be 30 by the end of the year.  There’s one girl who works in patient intake who looks like she can’t be more than 12.  I’m getting old.

The worst thing about my job right now is that I have a tendency to get words stuck in my head, the way other people get songs stuck in their heads.  Yesterday, the word stuck in my head was "meconium" which is the medical term for a baby’s first crap.  (I deal with maternity charts, so it comes up a lot.  More than I really care to think about…)  Today I have the word "protenuria" stuck in my head.  And I’m pretty sure that even in my head it’s spelled wrong.  

It’s not good to do the maternity charts when I haven’t had any kids.  I didn’t really need to know the extent of things that can split, lacerate, rupture and explode in my pelvic region if I choose to have any children.  I also didn’t need to know that "aspiration of meconium" was a very common delivery complication.  In fact, I never really wanted to know anything about meconium.

Alana 

Sunday…

I really don’t feel like going back to work tomorrow.

I still don’t have a desk.  I have a place to sit for 2 weeks while someone is on vacation, but my boss is just kind of hoping the pregnant girl will go into labor soon so I’ll have a place to sit for a few months.  On friday afternoon, I got a computer password, but I still don’t have access to all the software I need to do my job, so I still spent the whole afternoon bored out of my mind.  After promising "I’ll stop by tomorrow to get you your ID card," 2 days in a row, I still don’t have it.  I get to be interrogated every time I go into the office, and I can’t get employee discounts in the cafeteria.

Really, I’d like to say something positive about my job, but I haven’t really found much to love yet.  Some of the people in the office seem really nice.  Mostly they just seem busy.  

I’ve had a headache since Wednesday afternoon.  I’d rather stay home and sleep.

Alana 

Where is my desk?

After waiting over 2 months since I was accepted for this job, I was looking forward to today, expecting that someone would sit me at a desk, show me my login and password, and start showing me how to do my job.  Instead, I got, "Oh, so you are starting today.  We don’t have a desk for you, but V—– should be going off on maternity leave soon.  In the meantime A—- isn’t in today so you can sit at her desk while you copy the handwritten notes from her book into this book."

I don’t have a desk.  I don’t have a computer.  I’m still not doing the job I was hired for.  They have known I was going to be working there for over 2 months.  I could understand them not being prepared if I was starting soon after the interview process.  But it’s been 2 months.  

My supervisor is off tomorrow, and I have maybe 2 hours more work to do on the copying a big book thing.  I don’t know what I’m supposed to do for the other 5 1/2 hours tomorrow.  They made a big deal about being desperate for me to start as soon as possible, and once I get there, there’s nowhere for me to sit and nothing for me to do.  I don’t like working.  I want to stay home and sleep instead.

Alana 

Starting work

Today was my first day at the new job.  Well, I’m totally not doing my real job yet.  It was induction.  It was a lot like the induction/training/propaganda/brainwashing that I had at my last job.  In fact, they even use the exact same online training software.  Today I got to hear about the structure of the organization (yawn) and confidentiality (which I’ve heard at least 3 times before) and good patient care (which doesn’t apply to me so much since I work with paper).  I also did online training courses on fire safety and how to lift heavy things.  I get more fire safety tomorrow, and more lifting of heavy things on wednesday.

At least this induction is only 2 1/2 days, and not 6 weeks like at my last job.  And there was free coffee and cookies which was nice.  Plus, meeting people is easy because I’m American so that’s always a good conversation starter.

Alana 

Eurovision

This week I had my first experience with The Eurovision Song Contest, which I have heard references to since arriving here in Scotland.  It is a contest where all the countries of Europe enter a song into the contest and they perform and people vote on it.  In theory, the best song wins.

In actual practice, it seems quite different.  First of all, one of the competing countries is Israel.  Since when is Israel part of Europe?  Israel isn’t even Europe-adjacent like Turkey.  Second, each country isn’t allowed to vote for themselves, so they all vote for their neighboring countries.  Especially Eastern Europe.  All the former communist states vote for each other, and they out-number the non-former-communist countries, so they always get more votes.

The song that won was crap.  The song won because the whole band was dressed like extras from Lord of the Rings, but in actual reality, they were just a really cheesy pop version of a Kiss tribute band.   But the fact that a sucky song won is no surprise, since most of the songs sucked.  (Ireland wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t the best music I’ve heard from Ireland by far.)

My husband was telling me that the winner of the song contest’s country has to host it next year, and it is expensive and kind of a bad deal as a prize.  So here’s what I think it really is: no one wants to host the contest, so they all purposely enter the worst song they can find so that they don’t have to host it.  The winner is actually the country that most clearly succeeds in finding a song that sucks so bad that they know they won’t have to fork out millions to host the thing the following year.  So Finland, with their Kiss tribute band really only succeeded in having the suckiest national song that failed to suck more than the others.  The real winner was Malta, with only one point.

Good for you, Malta.

Alana

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