2 November 2023 (Thursday) - Sick of Being Sick

I had something of a bad night last night. When “er indoors TM stopped snoring so the thunder and lightening started, and continued right up until the snoring started again.
I gave up with sleep, came downstairs and saw that I’d completely forgotten that I’d put a load of washing into the washing machine last night. Ho hum… I hung that out, made brekkie and sparked up my lap-top. This morning the thing worked far better than it ever had done. Up till yesterday it seemed to be stuck in a vicious circle of notifications in which some trivial thing would happen (someone clicked “Like” on a Facebook photo, I’d had another email I never needed or wanted…) and it would give me a notification about it. My phone would then give me the same notification as would my watch. And then my lap-top would tell me that I had notifications on my watch and phone. Depending on how chatty the technology was feeling I would sometimes get up to half a dozen messages about things about which I couldn’t care less. I had words with the lap-top last night, and this morning it had seen the error of its ways. I got a lot less unnecessary notifications.
 
I had a look at my emails. I had a message. I’ve been having issues with uploading stuff to my blog backup. The nice people who run the web hosting are doing all sorts of wonderful IT things behind the scenes; the practical upshot of which is that (like with every single IT upgrade that has ever been done in all of history) the uploading no longer actually worked.
Matters weren’t helped by the way that every time they replied to my questions (of which there were several!) they would send me an email to tell me that they’ve replied to my message in the message centre, and I then had to fiddle about logging in to find out what they’d actually said. They’d sent me several links to various help screens, none of which looked like the ones in the diagrams they sent. After quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing it turned out that after the upgrade that they’d done, I needed to upload to a different place and I needed a new login name to do so. Sadly getting to that realization was rather painful.
I saw that an ELO tribute band had been playing in Hastings last night. Had I not been diseased I might have gone along; I saw they were still advertising tickets yesterday afternoon. A friend who went along said the theatre was half-empty. I suppose mid-week isn’t perhaps the most popular time to go out?
 
And a series of geocaches had gone live on the Romney Marsh this morning. Last time I had the rona I managed a cheeky First to Find. Might this become a thing? I’d seen that people on-line were saying that they’d heard from friends that others had said that their mates reckoned that the overnight storms had left many of the roads to the Romney Marsh flooded, and those roads that weren’t flooded were blocked by fallen trees. However no one was talking from first-hand experience, and Google Maps showed the traffic was moving normally. So I zoomed down to the marsh, pulled up by a road sign… and the heavens opened. I wasn’t put off by the thought of rain as I keep a raincoat in the car. Or so I thought. I wonder where that went?
After a few minutes the rain passed. I soon had the cache in hand. First to Find. Go me. I decided to leave the rest of the series for another time.
I came home, and seeing the rain was still stopped I walked the dogs round the block, then had a five minute pootle in the garden. And I then realised that a little drive out, a walk round the block and five minutes in the garden had been too much for me. I was knackered and sweating. Having decided I’d had quite enough slobbing about feeling sorry for myself I’d made a bit of a plan for today. And I simply wasn’t physically up to it.
I was rather pissed off – the idea of a week’s sick leave is to have a bit of bonus holiday. It certainly was the last time I had the rona. I’d rather have gone to work than have been putting up with this. I sat on the sofa under a pile of dogs sniffling and coughing and watched all of the remaining episode of “The Witcher”.
 
As I binge-watched my phone beeped at me, and reminded me that seven years ago I went for an interview at the Tunbridge Wells Hospital at Pembury. At the time I didn’t think the interview went very well, but I got the job, and accepting the job was one of my better decisions. As an example… On Monday when I go back to work the bosses will ask me how I feel. And it will be with concern. And if I don’t feel well enough I will take more sick leave… and won’t feel guilty for doing so.
In my previous job when I returned to work after sickness I was met by management with sarcasm and passive-aggressive comments about how there had been nothing wrong with me. Once after a bout of dire rear which had had me confined to the chodbin, and once after surgery.
And that was in a place which claimed to have a zero tolerance to bullying.
I should have changed jobs years ago

 

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