Tag Archives: nuisance

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Impersonal Day

After I post my story about nuisance on Thursday, I have a bigger nuisance show up. I get ready for work, tell my cat to have a lovely day, get in the car, open the garage door, back out and press the button to close the door.

It doesn’t close.

I try again.

It won’t close and is wonky at the base.

Dang it. I pull back into the driveway and investigate. Two of the wheels are out of the track and it’s obviously broken. There is a button lock between the garage and the house, but the garage also has stuff in it from the owners, including tools. I get a chair, stand on it and am clear very quickly that I can’t fix it.

Next I call work and apologize, but I can’t secure the house and can’t leave. They cancel my day. I have to dig around for the rental number but I find it. I call once, text, wait a bit and call again. He calls back and sends a person over.

The person take about half an hour to get there and he can’t fix it. They call a garage door company.

So now I am cooling my heels and stuck here. My kids all have wishlists for Christmas so I get everything ordered and sent off to my son’s. They will be rather inundated with packages since one Amazon order generated 7 packages all on different days. Goodness. I do some cooking, read a novel, and wait.

At 3 pm I let the rental person know that I am still waiting.

At 4:15 two garage door people show up. The wire at the opposite side from where the wheels are off is all tangled and off the rails. They have some specialized tools and it is fixed by 4:45. Part of the time is just them waiting for payment permission to go ahead with the fix. The garage door now opens and closes! I thank them and they head out. Turns out that their boss lives on my street.

A friend says, “You called in a personal day.”

“No,” I reply, “I called in a stuff goes wrong day. A very impersonal day.” My work did not give me any grief at all about it. We were already shorthanded but what could any of us do? Apologies to any patients who got canceled! We all do the best we can, right? Things break down sometimes.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompts: shopping and nuisance.

I deleted some past posts to make room but apparently not enough, sigh. Another bit of a nuisance. I can post a phone photograph but not one from my bigger camera.

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Batter batter

Right now the nuisance in clinic is not a bat or a batter but a battery. I have a hospital issued laptop from last April. I had a day of orientation and one day that they walked me through the electronic medical record. I absorbed about ten percent of what they said. One day is silly, it should be broken up over the orientation, over three days or more, but places do not do that. Anyhow, Friday afternoon I was done and supposed to see patients on Monday, with support.

I wandered back from the IT office to the HR office. “Um, I’m supposed to have a laptop. Is it already at the clinic?” HR didn’t know. They called the clinic. Nope, IT was supposed to issue me one. We went to IT together. IT was in the middle of a massive update. No one had remembered that I needed a laptop. They “found” one and set up my program. This all took another hour.

Months later we were on the phone with IT and I had to say the name of the laptop. “Oh,” said the IT person. “THAT’S where my laptop went.” I was issued an IT one, not a provider one. I don’t care, do I?

Except, the battery is old. I guess the laptop is “old” too, but it works. So far. However, the battery won’t last even through a morning now. I put in a ticket to IT about a month ago and a battery is on order “because that’s an old one, we don’t have those in stock”. I plug it in to the desk top in the office, but we run two or three exam rooms and it’s awkward and a nuisance to plug in and unplug in each room. I leave the cord in one room and cross my fingers.

Yesterday someone from IT shows up right before my last patient and takes the back off my laptop. Except the battery he’s brought doesn’t fit. He has to put it all back together. I laugh, because it’s kind of ridiculous. He does leave me a second charging cord, so now I have ones for two rooms. The risk is that I will forget and walk away with it plugged in and drop it. Of course, then I might be issued a “new” laptop.

That is the present silly mildly annoying nuisance at work.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: nuisance.

The picture is from the Saturday parade, a tree on a distant roof.