A series of unfortunate events

Some very strange things have been happening to me lately. So much so that my loving partner has started calling me "Princess of Disaster", or "POD" for short. Thanks darling.

Work disasters
I have had several diary entry errors which have led to me being in the wrong place at the wrong time on quite a few occasions. I have wasted a lot of petrol and upset at least one surgeon in the process. Positively the worst error though was getting out of bed extra early to get to a 7.30a.m. meeting, only to discover the meeting was indeed the following week. Wondered why it was so quiet in the room. Total loss was calculated as £1500 in business earnings, sixty quid  in petrol and at least six hours of free time.

Domestic disasters
My house has tried to eat me and electrocute me in the last two months.

The eating incident: before Christmas I was two-thirds of the way up the loft ladder when it slipped a little on the carpet.  Being a hinged ladder, this resulted in trapping my the ends of my fingers of one hand between the ladder and hatch. This was neatly pressed upon by my own 62kg of body weight, possibly more, considering I had just returned from a five-day trip to New York. This was pretty painful and as I watched the fingertips turn from pink to purple to white, I wondered how best to redeem the situation. I considered the options.
 1. Jump off ladder
 2. Scream for help
 3. Climb into loft and try to release fingers once weight off ladder.
Option 1 was tempting but on reflection I figured I would either dislocate, break or deglove my fingers of skin, most likely all three at once. This would be painful, disfiguring, expensive in terms of loss of earnings and worst of all, embarrassing in the extreme when presenting to the Accident and Emergency Department of one's own hospital. Option 2 was barely viable, as most of neighbours are deaf and I have recently fallen out with one of them scuppering planning permission. I was hardly likely to give them the satisfaction of helping me out of a crisis. So I opted for 3. Fortunately I was agile enough to climb into loft in a contorted, yet controlled fashion, take my weight off the ladder and release fingers. It did hurt a lot though and by this time the fingers had gone blue.
The electrocution incident. A live wire from an old shed had got wet and shorted out the entire house of electrics. Not knowing the reason behind the repeated blackouts I merrily flicked switches, completely unaware that I was dealing with raw voltage which could have electrocuted me or burned the house down.
Total loss of domestic disasters over £100 (£79 paid in call out fees to incompetent electrician who failed to resolve the problem in two hours and £25 to competent electrician who sorted it in forty minutes). The fingers are mercifully intact, I have not been electrocuted and house was not singed in the slightest.

Oh, also the dishwasher also packed up which cost approximately twenty extra hours in washing-up time over two months and a fifty quid repair fee.

IT disasters
My laptop's motherboard gave up the ghost leaving me without my data for a month. The whole month because all the flooding in Thailand meant it was difficult for the laptop fixers to obtain a hard drive onto which they could put all my data. Even data retrieval left me short of a few airline e-tickets which were attached to emails, now since lost to the ether. Total loss: over £1000 in data retrieval and laptop replacement, almost £1000 nearly lost in business earnings due to lost invoices. And no I didn't buy a MAC but yes I now have an external hard drive to back up my "stuff".

All in all an expensive and stressful few months. The stress was acutely exacerbated one day mid January when my  accountant over calculated my tax bill by £8k. I spent two hours wondering how much I could get for a kidney before he emailed me back to tell me it was his error. The angst was exacerbated one more time this week when I discovered my bank randomly removed my overdraft limits. Again they confessed it was their error. Accountants and bankers. Their little January jokes on us. Not funny.

FS

Total "ReCal"

Things have gone a little wonky recently. Nothing has physically changed in my life, ie. I have my health, one of my arms hasn't fallen off in the night, the house hasn't been struck by lightning and my garden hasn't tumbled into the ocean. Despite this I seem to have manifested some rather wonky thinking which has led to some even more wonky emotions.

Anyone who works with machines knows that they need recalibrating occasionally. No machine stays "on line" for long without a little corrective manoeuvre, and once things start veering off track they have a tendency to continue going so far off road that if nobody intervened with a calibration then the machine would spontaneously combust and end up on the scrap heap. Even my printer head needs a kick up the backside every now and again to get the fonts to print, and my gas monitors on my anaesthetic machines decide to recalibrate themselves it seems about six to ten times per day. So I think I deserve a little "recal".

Bear with me, it may take a few hours. Sensors are currently doing the checks and so far they have discovered I do not have cancer, I am not bankrupt (despite some regretfully excessive overspending on credit cards), my children are still alive and well, I am with the soul mate I always dreamt of, I have three holidays to look forward to and I have a well paid job. There will undoubtedly be plenty more sensor checks which will work out that most systems are functioning correctly apart from the thinking. I suspect in this department, a deviation of more than two standard deviations from the mean will be discovered which, if left uncorrected, would have led me to the event horizon of a black hole of negativity from which I may have never recovered.

I will update you later on the Recal progress, in the meantime, it seems like I am not the only one to have gone wonky recently (link courtesy of Dr D).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-16677456

FS

Daily Rant- automated check outs

So today I have to get something off my chest.

Self-service checkouts. This will be no news to people who follow me on Facebook. Pretty much all the shops I frequent now have these automated check outs. It doesn't seem that long ago that I was afraid to use these new-fangled things. I recall the fear of getting either accused of shoplifting because I hadn't scanned something correctly and accidentally dropped in the bag, or of looking like an idiot in front of a growing queue of impatient customers. In these early days I would relish the choice of being able to reject the "Unexpected Item in Bagging Area" catchphrase in favour of the "Would you like help with your packing?" question.

Today there is less choice. They are in most of the shops I use and I am therefore forced to use them. Consequently through practice I seem to be fairly proficient in using them and no longer am I in fear of mobs of angry Tesco shoppers brandishing their 10 items or less violently in my direction. So what is my problem?

Despite my extreme traits of social awkwardness and introversion, and quite frankly my tendencies towards being a grumpy bitch, I occasionally enjoyed the mindless banter that can be shared with the human being serving at the till. Like the best under-appreciated things in life, perhaps only now the human till operator has gone can I appreciate what I had. When being served by a chatty human, I was forced to interact with a complete stranger, something I would rarely do voluntarily. For a few minutes I would be reminded that there is another soul on this planet willing to help me about my daily chores. The fact that they sometimes offered comments on the weather or some type of product I was buying or a mis-shapen banana brought into my life a unique interaction. A human interaction with a stranger. This often led to a brief warming of my own soul and sparked a vague intrigue into who this person behind the checkout really is....what makes them tick, why do they choose to work here, do they even have a choice? As I have said in other posts I do not believe the job defines the person.

So the checkout girl, or boy, or man, or woman, served a brief distraction from what I consider to be a generally miserable task of necessary for basic survival- the supermarket trip. Seeing as I usually performed this task whilst simultaneously dwelling on some area of my life which was causing dissatisfaction at the time (crap job, no money, weather rubbish etc), for a brief moment the person behind the till could at least lift my spirits by reminding me there are other humans that may have similar issues, or even better no such issues at all yet are happy with their lot.

Reports of a broken yoghurt pot and instant assistance in receiving an unbroken replacement are now replaced with a recorded woman who simply tells me that the spilled yoghurt is an unexpected item in the bagging area. To me an unexpected item in the bagging area would include such items as a chimpanzee's penis, a Suburban truck, a relic from the sunken Titanic or a copy of JR Hartley's Fly-Fishing. Not a yoghurt pot.

The B&Q automaton is even worse. This one is clearly badly designed and poorly programmed because not only can she not consider the weight differential between a pair of tap washers and a spade, thereby constantly asking me to put said tap washers in the bagging area when they are clearly there yet outweighed five-hundred to one by the spade, but she also has PMT. No patience whatsoever, no sooner have I scanned the item that she tells me it has to be put in the bagging area. Now I am a fast mover, because I hate shopping and want to get through this as quickly as possible. Imagine your average octagenarian buying a six-pack of pansies for her window-box. Does she shout "get on with it you silly old biddy!" after she has asked for the item to be paced in the bagging area for the forth time and it is still making its way there?

Now Boots are at it, and even worse there I have to put in my own advantage card, which I rarely get the right way round first time. I used to rely on the lovely cashier for this skill which I was unable to master. To be honest if I had programmed the tills in Boots I would have deliberately calibrated them to shout "unexpected item in the bagging area" once the weight of a a pack of condoms was sensed. Just for a laugh . But I have a sick sense of humour.

I delight when I go to the USA where they not only have a human serving behind their checkouts but also someone else to pack your bags. Last time I went to Winn Dixie a lovely man called Merlin packed our groceries. I imagined this was his day job whilst at night he fluttered around casting spells. This is a nation in which employment of people is valued, and even magicians are given day jobs. I hope to God they do not follow the UK model and replace all these wonderful people with chip-and-pin automatons. Sadly I suspect they will, and I end with the image of "Johnny Cabs" fro Total Recall. Only when we get these, dear reader, will we appreciate how much joy we really got from "You never guess who I had in my cab the other day..."

FS

What do I do for a living?

The first question than frequently comes up in society when you meet a new acquaintance is

So let's get this straight. Personally I detest this question. It makes a huge assumption that what you do defines who you are. In reality what most people do for a "living" is not a reflection of what they are as a human being. It is merely a point in a pathway of their life, a summation of their previous experience and choices made.   

If I say to you I work in a charity shop three times a week, how does that make you feel about me? What assumptions are you making?  Does that make me a good person to you- a benevolent philanthropist willing to give up my time to a greater cause? Or a bored housewife? 

I could say to you I work in an abortion clinic every day. I could say I merely write in blogs every day in my pyjamas. Either way many will make an assumption based on their own core values as to whether or not I am a good or bad person.

As it is, most initial readers of this blog will be life acquaintances of mine and will therefore already know what I do for a living, so lets get it over and done with now...I am a doctor. A hospital consultant to be precise. But please don't judge me on this alone. Some that know me well are fully aware that my professional role is probably one of the most unsuited to my character. And therein lies much of the emotion that fuelled me to write this blog in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I will not bitch about my job in this blog, at least not directly. Just because I am a square peg in a round hole doesn't mean its my employer's fault. It was my misguided choices some years ago that got me to this point in life.

I much prefer this question

Answers on a blog comment please.

FS 

Introducing MOFS

Hello reader. Let me begin by introducing myself. I am a woman in her forty-something year. It is not that I do not wish to disclose my age, its more that I usually forget which year of my forties I am actually in. It seems after the big bang of the "big 4.0." that each year blends into the next, and will I suspect continue to do so until I reach 49 and have my next big crisis about my age. So there you go, I am neither 40 nor 49, but something in between.

What am I writing about? Musings of my mind. Reflections on life, past and present, and musings as to the future. I warn you, these musings can vary from bland to surreal and from amusing to downright nasty and sinister. If you can't take the darkness, don't enter the blog. The reality is, however, that I suspect most of us human beings have the potential to be darker than we realise, and you, dear reader, will have had even darker thoughts than I.

There will be no gloss. It will be raw, from extreme humour to extreme sadness.

OK, health warning over. Welcome to the Musings of a Forty-Something, and enjoy.

FS