Srsly.

So today I took my laptop into the college’s IT department for the seemingly simple task of connecting it to the internet. 2 hours later they reported that it was BSODing on startup and produced the welcome phrase, “…do you have a Recovery disk?” and showed little remorse as they informed me that I’d lose all my data, and that there was obviously a hard disk error that caused it to BSOD after they installed their own virus killer. Ya. I countered this with the fact that it had never showed any sign of hard disk instability in the 4 months I had it, and that it’s a young computer, and they continued to dismiss it as my problem, hardware failure. As an afterthought, they said they could back it up, and sighed dramatically and said no when I asked whether they’d be able to back it up today. As someone with at least half a clue, I decided to cut out the middle-monkey and back it up myself. After backing it up using Bart PE and the hard drive of Neville the recently harvested laptop attached via IDE to USB cable, running chkdsc remotely and all that jazz, I read the manual.

…

Did you know that if you start Vista while holding F8 down, it opens a dialogue box with the option “repair your computer?”, which not only restores your computer to the time just before it went wrong (in this case after they took of AVG virus killer and before they put on McAfee VirusScan), it also checks Microsoft.com for the reason, giving me this treasure of a screenshot…

Hard drive failure. Yeah. Nothing to do with the software. Totally.

I know – 2.34am and me awake? Whatever next.

Tomorrow is the First Day and my anxiety is of course at record levels. I think it’s a lot better to be going to a job you don’t know much about or know the people etc.; my first job was like that, and I go thrown in the deep end and coped, but if I hadn’t coped, I could have left, and the opinions of the people there wouldn’t matter one jot. Now I start a job with my ex-lecturers, in a place filled with people who know what I should know because they taught me it!  And it’s been a year, and I don’t know it anymore. Sure, I can marsupialise a rabbit abscess, worm a tortoise (don’t ask) and spey a cat but sadly those skills aren’t called upon much when you’re an anaesthetist. That said, CS, my pessimist ex-colleague,  works 1-in-2 weekends and has the world’s worst cases, and is currently doing a 12 day run of days.

Plus I am plagued with doubt and indecision – whether going into specialist practice was right, whether I’ll be working Christmas day, whether I’ll get free time off to go to court (am a witness for something) when I only get 12 days holiday a year anyway. As per my rotations, I strongly suspect that as soon as I have my scrubs and clogs and I know what I’m doing I’ll be as content as a contented thing; it’s the antici-

-pation that is the worst.