and again.....

...still sore, tired and stressed. At least I managed to put in a solid 9 hours or work, in spite of my satellite conn giving me glorious speeds of 3K on upload and (wow!) a whole 37K on download for most of the day. And having phoned their help desk on Monday to complain of similar bad performance...it's not worth even trying that route. Thick as pigshit? Nope, much much worse. It was like one of those jokes about support desk calls, only instead of the support desk dude having to be really patient with the user, it was the other way round. He had his list of questions, and oh boy, he was going to ask them all regardless of the answers I gave.

But managed to get a couple of things accomplished, anyway. No garden labour again, I am just too sore. After 3 days off, am beginning to think that maybe it's not all
self-induced by hard digging and hard typing. Am wondering whether some of it might be meds-related. I'll have to remember to ask p-doc tomorrow after I hobble down his long passage and yelp when I sit down.

One of the things I really dislike about his rooms is the long passage from the reception to his office. It's probably about 40ft or so, but he always waves patients ahead of him, so that he follows you all the way. And, thanks to DB, who pointed out that that's a long walk with nothing for him to look at except the patients fat ass wobbling ahead, I am so self-conscious about it! Not, of course, that I do anything different on the rare occasions where I take so long picking up birds that he goes ahead. Hell no, seeing as I think he has a pretty cute butt anyway, I take full advantage. Even though I know that I will automatically then blush when I sit down and look him in the face. Loser....

oh, my aching thumbs.....

....although it's my own fault, I guess. I knew I should have done typing at school instead of biology! Being a 4-finger and 2 thumbs typist is OK most of the time, but after a humongous number of 70-odd hour work-weeks, almost all of which is spent at the keyboard, my hands have now reached 'enough' status. My wrists, biceps and knees ache from digging in the garden and/or carrying rocks around for between 30 mins and two hours almost every day. My shoulders are a combination ache, from working and gardening. My thumbs though, are entirely due to too much keyboard time. Told my boss I was going to claim for whatever kind of massage included thumbs, but then told him as well that on second thoughts I couldn't bear for anyone else to even touch them... Even carrying four kitty-dinners through from the kitchen needed extra thought so as to hold the bowls without involving the thumbs. My most erotic fantasies now involve a massage before anything else - yeah, right. Not that anything else is that likely either.

I am sore, and tired, and should have a bath before bed 'cos I'm kind of sweaty from this evenings garden workout - how is this for practical? I managed to perfect the split today so that I spent two hours carrying rocks and paving stones from the front to the back garden, placing them all, and even doing some other small jobs, all at the same time as I worked. Just a question of leaving all the biggest systems re-compiles for the same time, so that while I my keyboard was locked running them, I could leap up and out and do 15 mins outside, and be back to catch the results, cut and paste them into reports, and start the next one running. Technically, they could be done in batch - if only someone could tell me the f-ing format for the commands! Can't log a call for it, because part of the motivation for the upgrades is that the product is about 6 years out of support. And when the office moved, no-one is too sure of where my manuals went. They definitely got packed, but haven't been seen since. So until they are found, and I know the right sequence for about 30 alternating 'x's and commas, I can only run them online. Tried about 15 different combo's in batch against a small system, but couldn't find the magic one.

It amazes me that work both makes me omnipotent and has me throwing up almost every day - sometimes both the same day. Goes back to my Jon-days...1992/93, when I perfected the facade. Not that management then or now know about the puking bits. It worked a lot better then, being a 27-year old, 58-kg toned and muscled, super-fit wearer of short suits, high heels and make-up. But even now, I have enough experience, and enough history to prove me right, and to get away with it. And in some ways, the fact that I am the only person in the office who gets away with wearing nothing but denims, t-shirts and slip-slops (and no make-up at all) - oh yeah, and carrying little birds into meetings, and stopping halfway to feed them - somehow reiterates the fact that I must be good at this. Otherwise they wouldn't tolerate me. Often, I wonder why they do.

Actually, I know why. They tried really hard, twice, to find someone to support my major client on an unpopular mainframe database, for a limited number of hours most months, with a limited future, at a fairly cheap rate. There are permanent people available, there are very expensive, highly skilled short-term people available, but there's no-one as flexible and as cheap as me, there's no-one who can provide this support as well as being backup/coverage on two other m/f database products across 6 other clients, there's no-one alive who actually wants my current job. The first time, the replacement stuffed up, and the client insisted that they see if I'd come back. The second time, they managed to get a higher-paid, much more knowledgeable guy in for this project, but he has set limits on what he does, and will do - which is why they are now paying him for half the upgrade, and me as well for vastly more hours. And this for a project I really tried not to be involved in... I am such a loser. Don't want to do the other coverage either. But I can't explain to my current boss why not - shit, if he had any idea of my emotional instability, I don't think I'd even touch ground on the way out........