Monday 25 October 2004

Pic of the day: More than 500 GB of disk space. Whatever shall I do with it all? Oh well. I'm sure I'll laugh (or at least grin) at myself when I see this in the "one year ago" entry next year, if I'm still around by then.

Did something

Yes, today I actually did something. A couple of things. It started with the preceding night. It was not good, and there was little sleep. But then in the morning I fell asleep and slept for eight hours. This, perhaps not coincidentally, means that I slept through much of the workday. When I woke up, I called my doctor's office, as I had in the night decided to do.

When I called in the beginning of this month, I got an appointment for the 5th of November. This despite the fact that I told them that it was about a sick leave. Today I called again, and pointed out that even though my life was not a stake, my money was. This did not at all impress the friendly woman taking their phones. No, I could not talk with the doctor. But I could try to call him on Wednesday between 8:30 and 9 in the morning. (I have had that spiel before; when I tried, nobody took the phone for the first half or so, then the line was busy for the rest of the time. As well it should be, since the doctor has a few thousand patients assigned to him by the state. Yes, pure Stalinism, looking all the more out of place in a country eating more hamburgers and drinking more cola than any other outside the United States of America. Not that the hamburger and cola are likely to improve our health, although many Norwegians and most of our women drink diet cola... mostly Pepsi Max.)

I guess this thing is constant across continents and millennia: The system kicks the small man. In this case, however, the small man is a were-porcupine. "You don't want to see me angry." But rather than saying that to the doctor's secretary, I decided to take my frustration out on the real enemy, my workplace which has brought this misery on me in the first place.

So I went to the city, helped a couple coworkers, and explained to the rest of the staff that I would stay off work until I could see a doctor. After getting their understanding, we talked to the boss. No violence or threat of violence was implied. This is not a typical personnel conflict, but more a case of cumulative stress over several years. As far as I can see from my journals for the last six years, the longest vacation I have had was one week, and that's not nearly every year, and not always at a time of my choosing. Most of my vacation days are spent covering up for sick leave. But as I've said, you can only kick a porcupine so much. Porcupines are the incarnations of passive aggressiveness!

***

With this out of the way, I felt much better. Earlier in the day some guy had called me and told me that I could come and pick up the external hard disk at North Corporation. (If I had been at work, he would not have reached me. Synchronicity? Clouds?) It was not the same model that I had handed in, which means that indeed all the anime on it was lost; but on the very bright side, this was a much improved model. It's a Western Digital with a built-in card reader and two outgoing USB ports, all with the same capacity as my previous disk (250GB) and at no extra cost. I can hardly complain! So I went and picked it up. I suppose they are not completely evil after all... but I have still not heard a word about the DVD burner I handed in this summer. Not that I need it... I already have one DVD burner that I don't use, after I discovered that my desktop PC has a DVD burner built in. Not that North Corporation knows anything about that: I'm pretty sure they would behave slightly differently if they knew that my journal was read both locally, nationally and internationally. Of course, most people come here for the pictures, but even so...

There was still sometime before the bus would leave for home, so I stopped by McDonald's and bought a small hamburger. I ate it slowly and chewed carefully, because yesterday even a half hamburger bun had caused my stomach acid to flare up. This time it didn't; I suppose eight hours of sleep does help for most medical conditions, or knowing that you won't have to stress for a few days. Or perhaps fast food is inherently good for me. Yeah, right!

And then I came home and played Civ3 till well past midnight, occasionally eating a cup of yogurt without getting sick. Life is good.