Monthly Archives: July 2004

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Bring Back Nap Time!

“I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.”

Okay that may not be true for me, but some days it feels like it, especially this week. When we get to the end of an implementation, the staff stop having questions for us. Once in a while you’ll hear someone yell “Blue Shirt,” but the question will take between 2 seconds and 3 minutes to answer and then you’re back to wandering the halls hoping for a disaster to hit one of the computers. Some departments have more questions than others and I wander to those (even though I’m not assigned to them) hoping to steal a few from the designated blue shirts. But guilt forces me back to my self-reliant wing of the hospital to hold up the wall.

Because of this there are too many of us roaming around so we have what is called “admin time.” This is when you take turns leaving the floor and going to work in the “blue cave” (our room in the basement which we temporarily use as a home base and keep all of our laptops). Working in the blue cave is brutal. It means sitting in a dark room where a few people are working their asses off and a few others are pretending. Meanwhile, other blue shirts wander in and out disrupting the silence with silly comments, unnecessary salutations, and general useless time wasting tasks. Sometimes you are that blue shirt. Other times, you are actually working on some project or another.

Today I had admin time. After surfing on my laptop with a snack in hand I found my eyes fighting to stay open. I grabbed my keys, headed to the garage, climbed into the back of my car, and took a 20 minute combat nap. I feel ten times better for it and, after grabbing a bit of salad and chips, I headed back up to the floor to relieve my other brain-dead compadres. Now I’m refreshed and ready to answer any question. Admin time has a whole new meaning for me now.

I just have to figure out what to do to make my presence needed on the floor. “What’s that doc? All your smartphrases disappeared? How strange. Well, don’t you worry. I can work on that for you.”

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Teen angst for all

Seeing as I haven’t had much to talk about lately (or else nothing I feel like sharing) I wondered about other blogs out there and what they talk about. Here is what I found. It tells us that over 50% of the blogs out there are authored by teens and another 40% by twenty-somethings.

This got me thinking. What would life have been like when we were younger if we had something like the internet and blogs. For most of us in this blog circle, the internet didn’t come to us until college, if that. In our younger years we turned to note passing, song writing, hard copy journals, school papers, underground papers, and good old fashioned phone calls. Today kids have Instant Messaging, cell phone/blackberry text messaging, email, and yes, blogs.

As some of my friends know, I have confessed to authoring a poor excuse for an underground paper while in high school called “The Real Issue.” Instead, I think with the proper resources, I would have loved to write an anonymous blog for all to contribute to. I am positive the publishing side of blogs would have enticed me since what I loved most about the underground paper was laying it out, putting it together, and then seeing the finished product. It was less about content (which is obvious now) and more about the fact something had been created that hadn’t existed before.

So here I am trying to find that bit of inspiration that the teens of today have and I once had, hoping to inspire in me some new blogging pattern. But I have a sneaking suspicion that short of some life-altering event, I may have to start making some stuff up.