Life goes on...

Even if we don't want it to. I have not been dealing very well with Shady's passing. You might say I was simply avoiding it. The fact of the matter is, I simply didn't have the kind of time I needed to grieve in one fell swoop. Unlike when immediate family dies, you don't get time off when a beloved pet passes away. Sunday ended up being a work-day, so I had to go in.

I've been slowly getting used to the idea of her not being here, but it's difficult not to expect her to come trotting out of the bedroom looking for me when I come home, or feel her weight on my shoulder as I wake up in the morning. I find myself wondering where she is, only to have the truth immediately slapped into the front of my brain and I wonder what I was thinking in the first place. I cried most of the day Sunday at work, in between calls, and went through about 3/4 of a box of tissue. Then I didn't cry again until last night. I couldn't - I couldn't afford to be distracted from my job to where I had been on Sunday - my boss wouldn't understand and I didn't want to face a lecture on "responsibility" and the "just a cat" speech.

So, last night, I finally talked to Fred about it again, and started crying because I could - and because I at least had a few hours to give over to it. I slept horribly last night, again, and this morning headed over to the hill to our "hot site" - the on-site call center where we are to get a taste of how the hospital works...

Which is interesting because we're in the basement of an office building, not in the main hospital - not even on the main drag of the hospital. We're in a back room of another office, also NOT patient-related at all, that we end up having to enter and exit from the back office door so as not to bother the doctors and office members that come in for help from that office. In short, the hot site is the red-headed step-child of the hospital.

I got there at 6:45 this morning to make sure that I got there on time, and had time to set my computer up - because, you see, we don't have desktops - they're laptops, with wireless mice and keyboards. We have to lock them up at night, which involves unplugging everything, turning everything off, shutting everything down, and putting them into locking cubbies. I *knew* how to shut everything down and close everything up, since I'd been there for half a day, a few weeks earlier...

However, setting UP is another matter entirely. The "instructions" do not go through how to set up the computer for boot-up at all, and if you'd never used a laptop or a wireless mouse or keyboard (hey - I'm just not that tech-savvie - I don't have one at home!), you can easily get confused... Especially when you have 12 of the bloody things to choose from.

So, here I am, thinking that I'm going to be let in by someone. I know there's someone in the office, but they won't open the door. I call the main call center, to find out who else is going to be there, etc. No one. I get to talk with campus security to get them to open the door. Then I have to track down where they moved the computers to, since they re-arranged everything from last time I was there.

I finally find the computers, but fail to realize that I must get the keyboard and mouse that matches the number on the computer - because the "instructions" don't say that. I haven't quite had enough caffeine in me yet, so I am oblivious even to how to turn the damned thing on - I worked on ONE laptop ONE time prior to this, and its on/off switch was on the side... This one had the on/off switch up at the top of it's internal keyboard.

After several trial-and-error things, I call the call center again, and the lead walks me through - all the while lecturing me on how I should have TOLD someone that I hadn't been trained on any of this... My response was "I was expecting someone else to be here WITH me, for exactly that reason. It's not as though I made the schedules." The final parting shot from the lead was "Well, next time they ask you to do something that you're not trained for, you need to tell them." My thought was "Well, next time they decide to schedule me for something, they ought to ASK me whether I'm trained for it, as a just-in-case measure, since they have the scheduling history to look UP."

After I *finally* got the bloody computer to boot up, and the keyboard and mouse to work with it, I managed to get to page 1 of the "instruction" set, and followed it through. After that, it was business as usual. Linda came in around 8:30, and was amazed at the day I'd already had - and pissed that they had ended up doing this type of crap to me...

It was... interesting. At least Linda is cool to work with.

~M