Blogruary Day 24: The Headache

Despite going to bed at a reasonable time on Saturday night, I woke up today feeling tired and fatigued. I can't say I was looking forward to going to work.

Blogruary Day 16: The Bath

I usually have a bath on a Sunday night ahead of a stressful week of degree week. However, I decided to mix that routine up tonight.

Blogruary Day 8: The Work Day

Today saw me wake up really late. I didn't wake from my slumber until 12:15pm which, trust me, is very late.

Blogruary Day 3: The Meal

I usually work on Sunday afternoons but as I ended up doing a shift yesterday night, today the world was my oyster.

Blogruary Day 2: The Lock Up

I've noticed something worrying about my life. I don't particularly like weekends.

The Sad Realisation

Over the course of the last two weeks, I have been  working with my Dad in the Supplies department at the Private Hospital that he works at. 

The work involves waking up at 7AM and then lifting and delivering boxes and parcels to various departments around the hospital. The positive of the job though is that my Dad lets me go home every day at Midday. 

On Tuesday, I drove home with my window down blasting out Capital FM on the car's now ancient stereo. I drove through New Malden High Street and I noticed so many people that I vaguely recognised from Secondary school. 

You know the type. The people who you constantly passed in hallways but you never spoke to, people who were a couple of years above or below you. 

I drove past a few of these people and something sad, disappointing and worrying struck me. They all looked really glum. 

I don't mean that they looked like those very unhappy dogs and had black clouds literally hanging over their heads. They looked world-weary, tired and lacking in hope. They cast the image of people who were stuck in a rut. They looked exactly how I felt at 7AM when I realised that I had five hours of hard-graft in front of me. 

Three thoughts quickly sprung to mind. 

One, were they glum because they were stuck in dead-end jobs with little prospects?

Two, did they want to travel the world yet found themselves stuck in the same town for the foreseeable future?

Three, did they not understand YOLO?

These thoughts, whilst potentially condescending, re-enforced my new attitude of working as hard as possible to fulfil my ambitions, my desire to not be stuck in my home town for the rest of my life and my attempting to try to follow the law of YOLO a bit more fruitfully. 

The Bad Day at Work

Recently, I have been thinking that it is time to grow up. It's time to become more of an adult. It's time to act like a mature 20 year old.

This has largely been due to the fact that I have had a fair number of conversations with different friends about the future and the big issue of what to do post-University. They have been interesting, revealing and life-changing conversations. Conversations that have had a profound impact.

Essentially, my main problem is that I only really have my long-term aims in life. I'd love to be a writer and I'd like to dabble in radio presenting and also politics. However, there seems to be a stepping stone missing as I really lack the short-term aims. I had no plan post-University.

However, that has all changed thank to these conversations. I have now a plan in place, something that I will actively pursue in the short-term. It's a basic plan. It's very simple. It's a plan consisting of only four word's. Get a graduate job.

In essence then, this has been my last summer of total freedom. The last chance I will ever have to control my life over a period of up to three months. Except, I haven't got total control at the minute. You see, my parent's both work at the same hospital in different departments yet they are both on holiday at the moment. Whenever my Dad or his assistant are unable to make work, I fill in. It pays suprisingly well.

My parent's offered me the choice to come on holiday with them, however, I felt it best they had a whole week to themselves and I felt it best to probably earn some money and prove my work ethic by filling in for my Dad whilst he was away enjoying a well earned break.

The first day in the job was easy. It was stuff I had done before whilst helping my Dad out. Now, whenever I work with my Dad I enjoy making his day that little more entertaining/stressful by mucking about and having a laugh. However, as I was working with my Dad's assistant, I decided it best to try my hardest and not muck around. I tried my best, or at least I felt I did.

Then I turned up today after getting stuck in the worst traffic to ever hit New Malden and ended up getting what I will term as bullied. It turns out I made two small mistakes in orders, I gave one ward three plasters by accident instead of three boxes and in my morning haze I had, by mistake, given the cleaners on one small ward 30 individual hand towels instead of a 30 packs of hand towels. Two mistakes that would only take one minute to rectify yet caused "great stress" according to my Dad's assistant. I apologised for my mistake. Only a nice person would do this.

Then she carried on this bizarre tirade at me, in front of one of the cleaners. I had left at 2:15PM after being told by my Dad before hand that I only had to work between 8AM and 1PM, generally people only work the times they are told. I had worked an extra hour and a bit, I felt this to be very noble of me. Coral, Dad's assistant, asked if I wanted to go for lunch at 2 and I told her "Oh, but Dad said I could leave at 1PM" to which she said "Oh, ok then". I even made sure later that I asked her if it was fine with her if I could go, to which she replied "Yeah OK". She then claimed today that she didn't want me to go, to which I thought "Well you could have said...."

She then went on to insinuate that I had a bad relationship with my Dad purely because I said he probably wasn't the best person to ask about my future career plans, she attacked my supposed lack of work ethic based purely on something my Dad had said to her and put two and two together and claimed my moral stance against the idea of private hospitals made me purposely screw up the orders.

I then proceeded to waffle on about politics and spent the rest of the day ignoring her as best as I could and doing the best job I could, mostly to hopefully help my Dad have a less stressful week at work next week.

I was then told by Coral in a sarcastic manner that "I guess you want to go home" at 1PM and I left and told my sister, who also works at this hospital, that I would pick her up later. I felt it important to negate this woman's cynicism and hateful attitude by being as nice as I could to every person I could. I drove at the correct pace. I stopped to let every person cross the road. I stopped to let every car get out of side roads and into the main road. I even bade a "good afternoon" to the owner of our local cornershop and opened the door for her whilst she moved the newspapers from the stand outside to the inside of the shop itself.

I felt good for this. I felt I had hopefully made the world a better place for these people with my small, nice gestures and that made me smile.

Oh, and Coral is such a stupid name.