Did they really want to phone me?

After a recent cold I now have a sinus infection and I'm taking some really strong antibiotics that are making me feel woogy and easily distracted. So when I kept getting a call on my cell phone from a 1-866 number (which I don't answer as a rule - its' just someone selling something) I dropped what I was doing and went for a little explore time.

There are a few services that come up when you google a "reverse phone number lookup" and they will tell you who keeps calling from a specific number. For a price, anyway - the free versions couldn't find the number. I'm not that annoyed.

So I googled on the phone number itself and found a wonderful forum where people were complaining about phone calls from this phone number! It was Fido phoning it's customers back in March 2007 and charging them for the calls if they were out of the country.

Just then, my cell phone rang.

So I answered it. Eventually the call centre agent came on and I talked to her for a bit. She promised it was a free call for me, so why not? Yes, I'm happy with the service. No, I don't want a new phone for the privilege of signing up for a contract. No, I have no questions or comments... and no, I missed the opportunity to share my existential angst with an unwitting call centre agent - but I was tempted.

Every once in a while I have answered calls that are obviously from someone selling something just for the fun of having someone tortured because they called me. The time that I was still living with my parents and got a call from a carpet cleaners was probably the most fun. Clean my carpet? I don't have a carpet. Clean my furniture? I don't have any furniture. Do you have a phone? Yes! I have a phone! Isn't that great? I obviously sounded like a kid, so this was just a bit of fun that wasted his time, but he called me, so he was fair game.

Sometimes I just feel like wasting the time of someone phoning to sell me something. They are paying for the phone time and the call centre agent, so it costs them money. Getting the call aggravates me, so why not make them pay for it? I don't get angry or abusive to the agent, it's not their fault, they are probably just stuck in a noisy room doing a job they hate. But the company they work for is fair game.

So next time I'm feeling easily distracted... I may not hang up so easily.

Isn't it nice dealing with people who have pride in their work?

I had to go have blood taken for tests today and it's always something I hate doing because people have great difficulty finding my veins. I typically have a pink tinge to my skin, but my body's attitude is generally: "Yes, there is blood in here. No, you can't have any of it." So when I find someone who can find the vein on the first shot without leaving a huge bruise, I'm very relieved. I'm sure I will never see them at the same lab again, it's only the ones who have problems who seem to stick around in the same job for extended periods of time, but I take my happiness when I can.

Today I actually had a lab technician who found the vein without a problem! Celebrations began almost immediately. I asked if she thought they would ever get one of the machines that use blue light to light up veins in people to make the job easier. She said she expected hospitals could make good use of those, but in the drop-in labs they don't really need it "Because we're all so good!"

Wow, actual pride in her work! That is so rare, and so incredibly welcome! Someone who does her job well, and takes pride in doing it well. Life is good.

Did you remember to bring the...?

It's taken ages to get everything together and you're outside your apartment waiting for the elevator now. Then someone says "Did you remember to bring the ..."

Now the elevator door opens and there's someone in the elevator. So you either:
* decide we really didn't need that anyway and go into the elevator
* split up and arrange to meet downstairs at the place you usually meet up when this happens
* apologize for making the elevator stop and everyone goes back into the apartment ... thus starting over again: "Did you remember to bring the ..."

On the outside of my apartment building there is a lot of construction work going on. This means that there are at least 5 construction platforms being used by the construction workers to go up and down the outside of the building. They are like little, slow elevators. They've been doing this for months, getting onto years now. Up and down. Slowly. The men on these little elevators wreak of body odor and cancer stick smoke and it all gets blown into our apartment. Day after day.

It's become quite obvious that the "Did you remember to bring the ..." problem is a plague on these construction workers. First thing in the morning, you hear the little motors going and the bumping on the outside wall begins. The babbling of radio programs gets louder as the platforms get closer to our floor, then fades as the platform goes higher. The stench of body odor and cancer stick smoke makes everyone inside wrinkle their noses in disgust. A few minutes later, the motors get louder again, the radio blabber gets louder, the smell gets worse. Then it fades again as they reach the ground. Half an hour later and yes, they are back, once again with the motor, the radio, the stench. They forgot to bring something.

It's annoying when you're going out for the day and have to go back to get something. But wouldn't you have a checklist if you spent your days going up and down on slow little elevators for a living? Wouldn't the aggravation of having to go back down to get a forgotten tool just drive you nuts?

Did I mention that the building is about 30 stories tall? Urgh.

Do I really want to know the construction workers that well?

Outside my window now, and for about the last year or so, there are construction workers working on my apartment building. Yes, a Vancouver condominium that needs repairs done on it from water damage, what a surprise! (Heavy on the sarcasm there, ALL buildings in Vancouver's West End neighborhood need repairs done on them due to water damage. No, we haven't had a flood or hurricane or any other natural disaster, we just live in a rain-forest area and no one can make a building that won't be damaged by the rain, which we get for six to seven months at a time. It's a soggy place.)

These construction workers talk a lot. They talk on the way up the outside of the building on the swing scaffold. They talk on the way down the outside of the building on the swing scaffold. They talk when not moving and the drilling momentarily stops (it's an occasional reprieve, they are replacing all of the tiles on every balcony, and drilling and refilling all of the joints between all of the wall panels out there).

The building walls are mostly glass, and they are also spending a lot of time replacing all of the caulking around every single glass pane. Glass is not a good sound barrier. So there is a looming shadow behind the blinds as the swing scaffold stops, they remove the old caulking, clean it out, and put new caulking on. This is not an engrossing task for them, they tend to talk the most when they are on the other side of this non-sound-proof glass.

It's a lot of talk about nothing in particular. Hockey is always a popular topic. Food – what should they have for lunch today. Games of various sorts. No debates about the dichotomy of good and evil, why don't humans have tails, or what is “colour” and is black a colour?

The problem is, I'm not trying to listen in. I really don't want to hear it. And I'd rather do my work without the chatter in the background. But I'm getting to know all about these men, and I don't want to. When I see them down in the lobby when we're all coincidently walking about, do I really need to be wondering which one had a great game of softball on the weekend? I'm going a bit nutty, and my ears hurt from listening to my Ipod all day! I'm beginning to think it would be quieter if I worked in an office building - at least it wouldn't be one conversation at a time going on! As a recent escapee from the corporate world, this makes me shudder!

Will my housekeeper get a housekeeper?

Nothing grandiose or elite about it, I have a housekeeper who comes in to clean once a week. She's quick, efficient, and does in 3 hours what it would take me days to do, so it's a bargain. Now she is seriously considering getting a housekeeper for her own home.

Why would my housekeeper want to hire a housekeeper? It's not laziness. It's just easier for a person who has no personal attachment to a place, and the things in it, to clean it! There is no rearranging because this might work better over there. There are no thoughts about when this should be replaced because it's worn out. There is no finding something you had been looking for so you drop the cleaning and go off to do what you wanted to do with it. It's just stuff you clean, and then you move on.

The other aspect of the problem is that when my housekeeper works all day cleaning other people's homes, and then goes back to her own home, it's depressing that HER home is not clean. She's been cleaning all day! Everything should be clean, and it's not! That's just a mean occupational hazard for a naturally clean person.

I have encouraged her to do what may seem silly to others – get a housekeeper!

Are children of crime scene investigators compulsive cleaners?

Sherlock Holmes was arguably the first crime scene investigator who paid as much attention to detail as the people on the current TV shows glorifying the crime scene investigator. And he was fictional, as are the people being played by actors on the TV shows. But there are real life crime scene investigators, who are real people. So there are likely real children of the real life crime scene investigators. So are these real children compulsively neat?

Humans go through a variety of stages as they grow up. One of the typical stages is becoming contrary to their parents. Having different ideas, beliefs, goals, and ways of looking at the world is a way young humans find their own path in life. Some call this rebelling.

So if a young human is rebelling against their parents, and his or her parents are crime scene investigators, do they do everything they can to make sure their parents don't know what they're doing? Are these children compulsive cleaners who try to remove any trace of their actions, so their parents would have to work really hard to figure out what they've been doing?

Or are these children really messy? Do they effectively dare their parents to figure out what they are up to by leaving massive amounts of clues, some intentionally misleading, for their parents to find?

Sir Author Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, had his characters living in a set of rooms that were cleaned by their land-lady, Mrs. Hudson. In several stories she was miffed by the mess that Sherlock made of his rooms before he went out and left her to clean them. So this fictional character was not always fastidious himself, not worried that others would figure out what he was doing by examining the details of his life. But was this a reaction a rebellion by the author against all the attention to detail? Was the author making a mess in the story to push away from all that detailed examination of everything, even the smallest shred of evidence?

Is the desire to make a mess, and dare the overly detailed oriented people to figure out what you've been doing, a natural human desire? Or is the desire to be very clean to hide your movements, so no one can tell what you've been doing, a more natural response?

What do children of crime scene investigators do?

Do Nurses Enjoy Needlework?

As I sit here and stare at the bruise from the needle I had yesterday to extract some of my blood for tests, I wonder if nurses and other medical professionals enjoy doing needlework in their spare time. Needlework being the arts & crafts type of activity where you sew thread into a piece of fabric or other substance to relax and make pretty designs.

I remember a while ago having to listen to one nurse talk about needles. She was a diabetic who had to give herself injections and they obviously unnerved her. She described invisible barriers; people who couldn't give themselves injections because they didn't leave the needle in the skin long enough; and other expressions of mental horrors at the thought of injections. Does she ever do needlework to relax in her spare time?

The lab worker nurse I had removing blood from my arm yesterday was not in a good mood. She had just had an argument about the types of shipping containers she was supposed to use with the man who picked up the containers. At this point I was worried. I had already taken a number, waited for the other lab worker to go over my lab work requisition, and been told to sit down again and wait to be called. It was too late to escape. If I had just come a bit later I could have done the “Oh, look at the time, I must run” gesture and legged it. But I was committed to getting an angry woman to stick me with a needle.

It's not easy to find blood in my arm, I keep it well hidden, so there is no way to really feel it, you just have to stick the needle in where you expect there to be a vein and hope. And then dig around with the needle to find blood. Been there, done that oh, so many times. So I was trying to be encouraging by nodding when she thought she might have something because that is where I can remember it usually being. She wasn't impressed. Oh good, make her angrier, that's a smart move.

She did finally stick the needle in and found a vein with only a limited amount of digging, but I still have a bruise. I have had people, confident and happy people, who have just stuck the needle in, got blood out, and finished up. There are just not enough confident, happy people in the world.

So does that nurse lab worker do needlework in her spare time to relax? If she does, what types of patterns does she do? I don't remember ever seeing a shark needlework pattern, or an abstract design with reds and blacks all over, that's what I think of when I think of her doing needlework. And the other nurse, the one who was the diabetic, she should do needlework to take her mind off sticking needles into flesh, but I doubt that she does.

I recommend needlework to help you relax, but I don't know if a nurse could do it without getting stressed out. That's the opposite of what should happen, but I don't think they could avoid it. This seems to be an occupational hazard.