It's Halloween, and I'm excited. For me, this is one of the best holidays of the year - a day when we all get to be something we are not. So many mythologies from all over the world tell us that today, the spirits are closer than at any other time of the year. For some that means that we are in danger, and need to fool the spirits into thinking that we are someone else so that they will be confused and leave us alone. Others say this is the day that the goddess, or the god, or a god or goddess descends into death, the world is freezing and dying, but will be reborn in the spring.
It is a celebration, a solemn time of reflection. It is a time to remember and a time to forget. We remember those who have died, and forget the pain of their passing. We remember the year behind us, and forget the troubles.
This year it is also a celebration of love. Tonight I am going to halloween party that is also a wedding. A wedding and costume ball all rolled into one. What could possibly be better?
Happy Holloween.
Warning: Rant ahead
I work for a hospital, and the IT department has been doing everything in their power to convince us that we should be doing everything on computers. This includes our charting. So in my clinic we have dutifully sent all the nurses and counselors to typing class and set up documents for them to chart in on shared drives. But Medical records insists that we send it down in paper form - on specially colored paper (I won't go into how silly that is). So we dutifully print each of the over 200 documents a week onto the special paper and send them down. This of course takes a lot of time.
So I put in a request to IT to set up some sort of program (deliberately not insulting them by telling them which program I wanted - Microsoft Binder which should have been installed with the rest of the MS office suite) which would allow us to print them all at once. I'm thinking this is going to be a no brainer and the only reason I can't do it myself is that I don't have access to add programs to our clinic's computers. Well the solution they come up with (3 weeks later) is to go in through the "my computer" icon and highlight them all and say print. A nice solution, except that it doesn't work.
For some strange reason (probably encoded in the network or printer connections - which are horribly confusing) if you print them that way, the printer flat out refuses to use the special paper. We've tried everything: putting the paper in the bypass tray, putting it in the default drawer, removing all other paper except the special paper. In every case if we try to print that way we don't get what we need.
So the IT tech comes up to "look at the problem" and tells me that she's there to trouble shoot the programs. So I tell her that the program isn't working. Oh but you see that's not her job, she's just there to make sure the program will run.
"But the program isn't working" I said.
"It runs just fine." she said
"But it doesn't print."
"That's not my job."
"Then what is your job?"
"To trouble shoot the programs."
"Well the program isn't working."
It went on like that for about half an hour before I flipped and said never mind we'd find a human solution since the computer solution wasn't available and told her to go back to her office and trouble shoot something there. I expect I'm going to hear about that when my boss gets back from vacation.
I work for the government. Don't you just love to see how your tax dollars are spent?
I'm here... I'm finally here... I've got my very own website, my very own Blog and my very own ideas for what I'm going to say here. Woohoo I'm one happy cat.
It's taken a while to get here and there've been many posts that could have been, but died of old age long before now. At the moment about all that I'm thinking about is how I really should be doing my homework. I've got so much that I should be doing. Papers and projects and books (oh my). On top of that, it's almost halloween and my costume isn't finished yet. So I guess that I'd better get back to my real life and let the ideas ferment a little longer.
'til next time.
-Mreauow-