National Health Service

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The NHS in the UK is ‘great’. It’s good knowing if you’re ill, the last thing you have to worry about is whether you can afford the treatment required to get better. I’m sure huge health insurance policies which cover everything provide the same feeling of security, but I’m a big believer in the social provision of things like the health service. And so, I think it’s great.

I just wish the people were equally great. Sadly, people are normal, and some people are better than others. And the NHS is oddly, populated with people. I have much respect for the people who work in the NHS, mostly, because it’s suffered a lot over the years and I bet it can’t be much fun.

But when you’re ill, you want some compassion, some respect, and some good advice, and when you get the wrong person in the NHS, you don’t get that, and it doesn’t help you get better. How a GP deals with patients is a critical part, in my opinion, of the recovery process. If they treat you with respect, and listen, and deal with your issues, getting better will be a hell of a lot easier than if they don’t bother listening, ignore your questions or provide sarcastic, unhelpful answers.

I know that they’ve probably seen 40 people that day, and more than half probably didn’t need to be there, and some of them were probably abusive and rude, but that doesn’t mean I need my GP to treat me like,

a) a 5 year old
b) a 90 year old
c) an idiot
d) all of the above

The two ‘classes’ of people I find best in the NHS are practice nurses and hospital specialist doctors. In the past when I’ve had any kind of illness, those two groups of people have been the most useful, compassionate, informative and understanding. When I had Bell’s Palsy, the initial nurse was great and the final specialist was superb and helpful, but the ‘layers’ in-between including my GP at the time were an obstruction to getting healthier, it’s frustrating. I try and forgive them, because I’m sure people don’t go into the health service to be like that, but it’s hard.

Life!

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So I suck at blogging 😉 What can I say. Work sucks, garden is a mess, house is rotting around us, car is falling apart, I don’t get enough sleep, I don’t get enough exercise, and I eat too much.

Yay life.

It was the darkest of times ….

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Getting to the end of the week, and several more people have been told they need to find alternative employment, as the company moves into a phase of ‘involuntary separation’. Mood on-site is pretty bad as friends find out they’re no longer required. Not much else to add.

eq

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Was really tired when I got in yesterday, so decided to just mooch about on EQ, start my epic 1.5 bypass quest and chat to friends. So, started the quest, found out the first fight is in PoTactics on a loot-dropping mob which is probably perma-farmed. Oh well, so complete change of plan, grouped with some friends in a DoN mission or 2, made another 10-12% on my way to 70. Only 64% left 😉

busy busy busy

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I always said I’d be happier at work if I was busier, and well, this is my chance [irony]. One AIX guy onsite (me), and one HP guy onsite (not me), two major incidents (one HP, one AIX), and all the normal work as well. Still you can only actually physically do so much – so I’ll just sit back and enjoy being stretched for once.

ding 69!

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another day another dollar at work, less tired today, although i got to bed much later than i should have. still, managed to make level 69 on my warrior in EQ, i know in know, you’re all thinking wow awesome well done. oh? you’re not? oh well ok, it was awesome though 😉 and couldn’t have happened without the excellent bunch of guildies i play with.

it’s an oddly positive mood at work in between the periods of complete blackness. we’re just sort of hanging on for the announcement about involuntary redundancies and/or moving all of our workload off-shore and how that affects our roles. i think we’ve just decided that there’s nothing we can, so we just stick it out, grin and see what happens.

and today, too lazy for the shift key

Busy but Progressing

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Pretty busy at work, as you can imagine considering we’re 1/3rd the size we used to be in this team. Probably means a lot more out-of-hours work for me over the next few weeks, including evenings and weekends. Sort of a mixed blessing, I can always use the extra cash, but it eats into work-life balance, which is already skewed towards work due to the energy it uses up staying positive. But, we move closer and closer towards the day we finally pay off the 10k loan, and that means we’re £200 a month better off, which is something I’ve been looking forward to for nearly 7 years.

Blurgh

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Blurgh it’s early, after a week off work getting up at 10am it’s going to take a few days to get back into the concept of getting up at 7:30am, never mind being able to actually do it without feeling like a week old corpse. I’ll try not to post exactly this same blog entry every morning when I get up for the next week 😉 Assume I’m ‘blurgh’ until further notice.

A New Dawn

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And here we are again, another attempt at blogging, another promise to keep my website up-to-date, will I manage this time? Who knows, certainly not me.

I played with the idea of using Blogger, but decided since I had other stuff on this site I wanted to keep I’d try again here, and at least it keeps it all in one place. I’m going to try and put something in here every day, mainly for myself, but also to keep friends up-to-date with what’s going on. Lots of friends just left work, and I don’t want to lose complete touch with them – so this is my attempt at that.

car and bens

As usual, it starts with cars 😉 This time, failed the MOT but only on front-lamp (no pattern) and break lights (always on) which is damn good news for us, considering our luck with cars. Oh the breaks need looking at and the engine has an oil leak (our drive is clear evidence of that), but the MOT will be fine on Friday once we get the lights done. Major good news. Grete’s appeal against her benefit decision came through a little while back, some of you already know, and was found in our favour. Mixed feelings, it’s odd being told you are officially ill after all, but at least they’ll pay the benefit going forward, and Grete got it back paid since last year, which helped buy some glasses for us both (more later), and a few other nice things.

eq

So, still playing EQ. Not quite as aggressivley as I was while in the raiding guild, but still pretty much all our spare time is spent playing or dealing with the game. The guild is moving forward, we run regular raids on weekends now (myself and another member co-lead them), and they’re fun but a strong committment. Got some WoW accounts, and played a bit, but it’s socially void even though it’s technically excellent, so struggling to get into it, and at around the same time, EQ really picked up again socially, which didn’t help.

vision

It’s been on the cards for a while, but I finally went for an eye test, and yes, I’m short sighted. After spending my teens and 20’s with perfect vision, it’s frustrating to find it’s no longer so. I’m still legal to drive apparently (although not owning a license might be an issue), but I’m definately getting short sighted. Got a couple of pairs of glasses which I should use when doing long-sight work, although I’ve not started doing them yet.

work

I used to work in a team of around 11 people, some two years ago. Now, the team is down to 5, with 3 covering the same work that I do. Down from a 1 in 5 24/7 rota to a 1 in 2 24/7 rota. Four of those people left last week while I was on holiday, due to some unforseen timing, and an offer of voluntary redundancy. Several other friends in other teams left at the same time, and more are still planning to go. So, very different place this morning to the one I left 10 days ago. Uncertain times, unhappy times, we’ll have to see how long I can stick it out.

the web

I’m a total slacker with the gemmell mania website. Haven’t updated the news on the front page in 18-20 months, and rarely read the forums on there. I really need to decide what to do with that site, either ignore it, close it, or hand it over to someone else. Having fun with the Truly Naughty Troop website though. And the guild members seem to like it.

Dawn of a New Age

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… again

So I thought I’d try some blogging again, to pass the time when I have the time, even though I know I’ll never get around to keeping this up-to-date, and I wonder why I’m not doing it on my own website?