Thursday, September 01, 2011

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[EDIT: Many months after accidentally posting this empty entry because my touchscreen phone got jostled around my pocket and SOMEHOW, the blogger app got ACTIVATED, I stumble on Karsten's comment. That has got to be some sort of validation for someone to even comment on a non-blog post. Hihihihi...

Although, this is not to say I will be blogging anytime soon. I am going through a phase many experts call LAZY.]

Saturday, May 28, 2011

A Fear Of Commitment


I've never purchased anything on installment (not even on 0% interest for 12 months), never borrowed money from a bank or even from the SSS (I understand we're allowed to, one of those adult things I was never aware of.), and I've been wary of entering contracts of any sort. The closest thing I've gotten to binding myself to some corporate entity is my 2-year postpaid mobile phone contract and 1-year broadband contract. And even when that broadband contract ended last year, I didn't apply for retention despite the various enticements that Smart offered. (A printer, or a phone or some minuscule monthly rebate. Right.) The reason is, I don't like committing myself to these things because some obscure event might trigger me changing my mind in an instant. Like what happened this week.

It was one of my very rare days off and internet at home was busted. Called tech-support and after having established that I had basically done every form of resetting, restarting and reconfiguring that they could throw at me, they promised to send someone the next day to fix the antenna thingamajig. Somebody came, went up the roof and rotated the antenna. Internet was still a little slow but at least there was a connection. Tech guy said there was some ongoing technical enhancement and that the connection should improve in a couple of hours. Wasn't really able to check on that because I had to go on yet another 36-hour duty.

37 hours later, status post double code and a final gunshot wound admission, I arrived home, exhausted, feeling a little sick and STILL with fcky internet. Signal was so erratic, I had 12 hours until I had to go on a 24-hour duty and sad to say, I spent those precious hours trying to fix things. Called tech support and he goes, "Open command prompt and type 'ipconfig release'" repeatedly and I kept saying "Dude, it says incomplete command. Isn't there supposed to be a forward slash there somewhere?" And then he goes, "Um, why don't you try that. And uh, type 'ipconfig'... you know about this already, right?"

"NO." Okay, maybe it isn't his fault he mistook me for some IT person because I can sound like such a smart ass. Anyway, I wouldn't have gotten pissed if he didn't tell me that, "Maybe you should have your LAN card checked. There's nothing wrong from our end here. Maybe there's something wrong with your laptop."

Maybe there was something wrong with my LAN card. I'm not tech-savvy enough to know what that even looks like but he seriously couldn't explore the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there's something wrong with the antenna? My phone had the same problem with the WiFi and I'm not sure if phones even have LAN cards, should I go have that checked, too? And so I was pissed. And that state of pissed-ness led to a 2-year contract with Globe. I went to their wireless center, purchased one of their portable WiFi things and applied for cancellation of my subscription to Smart.

So the moral of the story is, try not to get pissed when you've only had 3 hours of sleep. Or you'll end up paying P1,300 every month for the next 24 months.

Thursday, May 05, 2011

The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish

Actually, that's one of the few Neil Gaimans I haven't read. I already have goldfish at home (well, my mom does) and even if I didn't, I wouldn't trade my dad for them. Not even if they were magical and held the secret to world peace or perfectly bouncy hair. I was too lazy to think of a title less dumb than The Day I Went Nuts Because I Couldn't Find My Pen.

A black Pilot GTEC C4 sign pen to be exact.

It's not a secret that I can be anal about my writing implements. I've been using this specific type of Pilot since high school, roughly 15 years now, and I simply don't like using any other kind. And then one early sunny morning, I woke up with a sunny disposition (I always do, don't argue.) to admit a pregnant woman scheduled for a cesarean section and I was almost through with my admitting orders and history when I had to go get the fetal heartbeat. When I got back to my admitting counter, MY PEN WAS GONE. The horror!

I rifled through all the papers, searched every nook and cranny of the ER counter, checked my pockets... hell, if my underwear had pockets, I'd have looked there too but alas, it was nowhere to be found. I retraced my steps, checked the container for the Doppler, still nada. I even checked and rechecked empty pockets because you never know, magicians pull rabbits out of empty hats, why couldn't I pull a sign pen out of an empty pocket? And you know how sometimes you look for something and then later realize that you've been holding it in your hand all along? Well, I stared at my empty hands, like some lunatic, just to be sure.

I was ready to go into a full-blown tantrum. It's not that I can't write with a Uni pen (yech), I'm not that moronic, but I won't like doing it. No matter how busy it gets, even if I get bombarded with a truckload of patients, as long as I'm using my pen, nothing could faze me. My gloved hands could be covered in blood but I'd still be cracking jokes. Not in front of the patients of course, but you know.

Anyway, I was running out of options. I even went so far as to accuse the charge nurse of hiding my pen.

Me: Chingkaaaaaay! Aha akong sign pen baaaaaa? Stop hiding it!
Nurse: Nganong itago man lugar nako, doc?
Me: Kay you know man nga maboang ko kung di nako makita! Where is it lagi baaaaaa? (whilst feeling her up in a completely non-sexually harassing way)
Nurse: Na, ambot nimo, doc. Basin naa didto sa patient, sa iyang bed.
Me: Nganong moabot man lugar didto beh?

But I was already considering where in the patient's bed my pen could be. And the dilemma of how I was to go about looking for it presented itself. Do I have her turn to sides to see if she was lying on it? Do I shake her blanket? Those options seemed too, well, unprofessional so I made up excuses to keep going back to her bed to look for it out of the corner of my eye. First I informed her of her pediatrician (even though she already knew). Then I informed her she can't eat anymore (even though she already started fasting the night before). Then I told her she would be going to her room in a few minutes. Then I just resorted to peeking in between the curtains to see if I could spot it on her bed without her knowing I was there looking, like some crazy voyeur.

Fresh out of ideas, I was practically yelling, "I am not admitting another patient until I find my pen! Ching! Where's my pen?! Stop hiding it ba!" And then the patient was wheeled to her room and I rushed to the bed she vacated. I turned over the pillow, almost yanked out the bedsheets and there it was, hidden beneath the linen.

*grin*

Double rainbow!

I sat back down, happily admitted the two dialysis patients that arrived during my near tantrum. And when no less than FOUR patients came in at the same time for their scheduled cryosurgeries and had to be admitted in a span of *minutes* because the surgeon was waiting at the operating room, I was all like, "Bring it on."