Another Day in the Life

Good day, all, and welcome, to another boring day in the life of me!  Trish from Love, Laughter, and a Touch of Insanity is hosting the second round of her Day in the Life event, where we get to chronicle and share our days with each other.  Much to my surprise, last time it was actually really fun to write about my day in all its boring glory and even more fun to read everyone else's so I was more than happy to play again.  I chronicled last Tuesday since it was a little more exciting than the average day, though I totally took most of the pictures on Friday, because I forgot on Tuesday and also I am a cheater.  Anyhow, here it goes...

6:30 AM - Alarm goes off interrupting a vaguely disturbing dream that may be indicative of my watching too many crime TV shows lately.  It's earlier than usual, and it's the week after the spring time change so it feels even earlier, but I've got to be to work early.  I stretch out my Frankenankle (That's the ankle they surgically put back together after I broke it last summer, if you were wondering.  I usually just call him Frank.) and its accompanying leg, and then head for the shower. 

 7:30 AM - Usually I like to read a few pages over a bowl of cereal, but alas, there is no time for that today.  Cereal stays tucked in its cupboard.  Joe Meno's Marvel and a Wonder remains nestled on the cluttered coffee table, all sad and neglected.

7:45 AM - I have a super short commute now.  Unfortunately, the commute from the parking lot in to the hospital where I work takes almost as long as the commute from my apartment....

8:00 AM - Say the briefest of hellos to my desk before before bidding it a fond farewell.  Normally, I would take time to be disappointed in how deeply unfun my office area looks, but today, I have important work to do, or so they tell me.

8:10 AM - Today is all about this thing.  Meet Remmy (name has been changed to protect the innocent).  He's a very tall (Dark? Handsome? Er...nope), computer operated storage closet of sorts for all the lab's supplies.  I've heard myths that some places achieve their Rem install in a mere three days.  At my place of employment, where we like to do things the hard way, it's more like a year and three days.  The vendor rep we work with is on site for the third time.  He's been working with us for so long that my employer should probably just start paying directly into his retirement account.  My project partner in crime and I are cautiously optimistic that our pilot might actually get off the ground this time.

11:00 AM - Haggle among six people the right size space for supply after supply after supply.  I silently lament that my two years in lab almost-IT has come down to efficiently reorganizing what has essentially become the lab's giant junk drawer.

12:10 PM - We break from our exciting morning of space allocation for lunch.  I drop a contact on the floor before we manage to head to the cafeteria.  Happily, one of our developers is there and helps me find it thus saving the day from utter ruin.  Someone would literally have to take me home.  I'm blind as a bat.  I give it a rinse and jam it back in my eye, stopping for only a moment to wonder how long it will take my eye to start necrosing.  That's a fancy lab term for "rotting." The floors around here aren't exactly sanitary. 

12:30 PM - With the addition of the Remteam, lunch is filled with startling revelations about air travel for the super tall, hunting in Maine, and the absence of peanut butter in Europe.  There are places without peanut butter.  I am deeply appalled.

1:30 PM - Return to dynamic storing. The word "dynamic" really makes it sound like it might be interesting.  Don't be fooled.

2:30 PM - Break from storing to switch our other storage units back to their original server.  Take a lap of the labs getting people to log out of the software and enduring light, mostly good-natured ridicule from lab staff.

3:20 PM - Server switch completed, validation successful.  Another problem solved?

5:00 PM - Yay, workday is over!  Normally I would retire to my apartment to sloth about watching The Voice and spend a lot of truly unedifying time scrolling through my Facebook feed.  Tonight - cautiously celebratory wing night with the Remteam!

 Waiting for the bus that will take me to my car (in the next county) which will take me for wings.

6:00 PM - Table is paved with wings and cheese fries.

6:30 PM - Stomachs are paved with wings and cheese fries.

7:30 PM - Home.  I'm single and live on my own, so good news, as long as I'm okay with living in semi-squalor and rewearing the same pants tomorrow as I did yesterday, there's still plenty of time for slothing about watching The Voice on Hulu while liking cute pictures of my friends' babies on Facebook.  Yay squalor!

9:30 PM - Finish watching The Voice.  I could do something productive, but it's more fun to consider taking a sweet European vacation with a friend I haven't seen in forever to a place that looks like this.  Actually, a place that is this...

10:30 PM - Time for bed.  One more day of stimulating dynamic storage awaits!

A Day in the Life

Can you believe it?  I almost forgot that today Trish from Love, Laughter, and a Touch of Insanity is throwing a blog event where we all see get to share a day in our lives with each other.  I'll admit, upon seeing her introductory post for the event, I thought, "That's so much fun!"  Followed shortly thereafter by, "Oh crap, a day in my life is soul crushingly boring!" 

That said, I don't want to be a "taker."  If I'm going to be a creepy voyeur into the other bloggers' days, the very least I can do is offer up one of my own.  I wish that I could think of a clever way to do this that would make my life seem, less, you know, soul-crushingly monotonous, but I cannot.  Alas, I am left to pick one soul-crusher among many. 

I guess I could pick this past Monday when my day started at 1 AM because I was still on call for work.  My department supports lab computer systems for rather a large rural Pennsylvania health system.  My job function is a step below IT, and it's a good job with great co-workers, but it definitely is as boring as it sounds.  Except for when you're on call and awake at 1 A.M. trying to solve a problem that could probably have waited until a decent hour, then you kind of wish it was more boring. 

So, on Monday, I rose but I did not shine at 1 AM, then went back to bed, then rose again around 4 AM, and then went back to bed again, and then rose yet once more to the sound of my pager's song (Say, are you doctor?  Why no, I'm actually a time traveling 90s drug dealer, thanks for asking.).  So by 7 AM I was already up for the day.  The end of my tenure on call was in sight (Hello 8 AM!), which was obviously like a siren call for all the unsolvable problems of the lab technology world.  I kept working until 10 AM trying to solve the unsolvable, even though my actual workday doesn't start until 1 PM, so that 8 to 10 AM window is really when I should be (and usually am) reading The Martian (or some other bookish equivalent) over a delicious and nutritious breakfast of either lower sugar oatmeal or cold cereal with chocolate in it (depending on just how healthy I think I can force myself to be on the given day).

Having sacrificed my reading hours to the cause, I shuffled my weary bones off to work with some disgruntlement. Especially, after witnessing my adorable little cat doing what cats do so well.  She's doing the same thing now.  Jerk.

Aww, so cute.  Still a jerk.

Working from work is way better than working from home, if you don't count the travel time, the ridiculous parking situation, and, you know, having to wear socially respectable clothing.  I mean, at work, I have two monitors instead of my tiny laptop screen, and there are also co-workers there who amuse me and take me for walks before I get the chance to inflict grievous head injuries upon myself while dealing with the support structure of a certain major lab information system.  What more could a person ask for, right?  So, there's the 8 or so hours of monotonous working punctuated by random emotional outbursts and profound disappointment when that thing you totally thought would fix somebody's problem totally doesn't, meaning you pretty much wasted a good half of your workday only to call someone up and disappoint them by admitting that, at the end of day, you haven't the foggiest clue about why they're getting that obstructive computer error. 

There it is, the workplace, about 15 construction projects ago.

Then, with all the satisfaction a starving person feels after gnawing a tree branch, the first post on-call workday draws to a close (not with a bang but a whimper), and I report home for...you guessed it...TV time!  Monday's feature of choice was Downton Abbey, of which I've recently become a fan (Behold the grammatical correctitude!  Punctuated with sentence fragments full of made up words in a badly placed parenthetical expression!  English teachers continue to spin in their graves with only the briefest of pauses!).  We're working our way through season two of Downton with the help of our newly purchased Amazon Fire TV stick which is, indeed, way better for TV reception/general entertainment than a seashell (thank you Fire Stick commercial!). 

After the token moment of TV, it's off to get ready for bed.  I, being a great multi-tasker (bwahahahaha!) use Monday night's getting ready for bed time to continue memorizing 1 Peter 2 for my Tuesday morning prayer group/Bible study.  Actually, I think the descriptor I was looking for above was "great procrastinator."  It's not like I didn't have a week to memorize.  It's just way more fun to memorize things while you're brushing your teeth and partly in a coma.  So, with Bible verses freshly committed to memory (hopefully), I stumble off to bed where I manage to read barely a page of the poor neglected Martian before the lost sleep of the night before returns to claim me and another day in the life is complete.

Ergo, so is this post.  Sorry there aren't more pictures, but master procrastinator that I am, I totally forgot to even write this until about noon yesterday.  Now you'd better hurry on over to Love, Laughter, and a Touch of Insanity to have your soul re-inflated with some other blogger's day that is actually interesting. Thanks for tuning in!