The Beginning of the End

I have been working as a temp at a hospital for too damn long.

Grumble!

Never in my professional life have I been a temp at the same client for five years. It's unheard-of. It's stupid, for starters. Add to that my whopping 71 cent raise during that time, and the fact that I have been expected to manage 300+ doctors, 120+ groups, and a dozen health plans that merge, buy, sell each other, and at random "lose" applications and terminate doctors for no reason, and it's a nightmare of slave labor. But really the worst part has been that there is no boss. The person overseeing the work I do had it dumped on him in addition to his regular job, more than 15 years ago, with the directive to keep the "loss center on life support until [they] figure something out."

I have repeatedly told him that this is madness, and they either need to get some one in charge to take care of the insanity, or let it die the death it is seeking. But no one listens. "Job security," he tells me. I wonder if the slaves heard the same about picking tobacco.

I've suspected since talk began about building the replacement hospital that one of the changes would be that my position in the department would be phased out. So as they talked about the future in the new location, I knew I wasn't going to be part of that picture, and I was okay with that: I don't want to be doing this for the rest of my life.

But then last week I heard a rumor about the bus routes being replanned, and this week found out for certain that the bus I take to work won't be running as of November 24. The closest other route leaves me almost a mile from the office, on a street with a bridge and no sidewalks.

So yesterday he's giving me a pep talk about "embracing" the chaos that is my job, "stepping up" and taking charge of the department, and then tells me that the largest payor, the only plan that really makes any money for the hospital and keeps this mess going, is losing membership in the area and will likely be suspending business.

Every time I opened my mouth to tell him the buses had taken the option off my hands, he got more peppy.

But when I got home, I realized that the anxiety was gone. I realized, I'm FREE!

Next week I get to tell my company and my clients that they need to get a replacement ASAP, and I will train that person to beat the dead horse, and then I never have to worry about that mess again. None of the problems are my problems anymore!

It doesn't matter yet that I'll need a new job, that I'm losing my sole source of income in xmess shopping season, that it's nothing less than cruel to dump this mess on some one else. Right now it's only the relief of being liberated.

Relief and the hangover from celebrating last night. It's all good.

Bad Spam

Checking my email this morning, I had four messages in the Spam folder advertising child porn.

Most spam I just delete without concern. But in this case I wasn't going to just dump the junk. Gmail doesn't have a one-click reporting feature, so I did an online search and found that the Cyber Tipline of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children http://www.cybertipline.com/ has an online reporting form. (It includes options for reporting incidents in or from the UK, Australia, and Canada as well.)

I'm pretty liberal about live and let live, but the exploitation of children is something that no one should be okay with.

NaNoWriMo 2008

It’s almost November! You know what that means ...

Nah, not the elections. More important than that, it’s National Novel Writing Month.

NaNoWriMo calls to us all to connect with the writer within and write 50,000 words.

Had an idea lurking forever that cries out to be shared with the world? Now’s your chance to get it out and let it shine. Can’t string a sentence together? No problem! The goal is just to write – good, bad or indifferent – and celebrate the wonders of the written word.

And there’s no need to go it alone. Sign up for free (free is great!) at the official National Novel Writing Month website, www.nanowrimo.org^. Connect with other writers – professional, amateur, and hopeful – in your area and around the world.

See you there!

Help yourself to a copy of the NanoRhino image!

Sunday Rewind

Well. It's been an interesting month to say the least. :)

I've hit 150 posts and 3,000 visitors. Not bad.

I've got my dot-com going with products from Zazzle and Cafe Press, as well as helping to promote the collection "An Essential Jinx" by C.A. Broz.

Who knows what this week will bring ...

Mood:

Productive

An Essential Jinx

The short-story collection introducing the Quasiverse, following Jinx.
From the internationally recognized rising star of occult fiction, C.A. Broz.

---

Mood:

Impressed

Grr!

Trying to do cover art for a book and I have no inspiration whatsoever! It doesn't have to be fancy, the author says plain text on solid background is fine, but I want to do something at least a little more evocative than that.

Mood:

Frustrated

Internet-Taming Tools

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but the Internet is a mess. It's full of stuff!

As I'm trying to regain some control over my virtual life, I've found some useful tools for doing so I wanted to share.

Flock is a "social web browser" - that is, you can log into your Faceook or MySpace account and have your friends available in the sidebar. But that's only the beginning: web-mail, bookmarking sites, bloghosts like LiveJournal and Blogger, and media sites like Photobucket and YouTube also "plug in" to Flock.

Twitter^ is great for those bits not long enough for a blog post. If you also use Facebook, you can add the Twitter application and have Twitter update your Facebook status.

Digsby^ is a multi-platform chat client for Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, ICQ, Facebook, MySpace, GoogleTalk, Jabber ... You can also create a chat widget for blogs or websites right from the application (you don't have to go to the Digsby site).

Last but not least is Netvibes^ to bring it all together. I have Netvibes set as my Flock homepage, and the Twitter widget on the start page. There are plenty of premade modules one can add for newsfeeds, games, and more, or you can add your own content with handy HTML modules. And because it's saved online, you can access your start page from any computer with Internet access. You can see what I've done with mine at www.wildaspie.com^ and www.wildaspie.net^.

Mood:

Determined