Training & The Shutdown / Ultrasound & 2nd Opinion / Apartment & Time Capsule Disappointment
Training at work continues. As I said before, my trainer is usually too busy to properly train me. My final test is this Thursday. Am I ready? Maybe. Just in case, I've got all my notes here and I'll be studying until then. Once I'm certified, I'm hoping I'll go back to my original machines and only act as a backup for my new area in case people take the day off. I've got a horrible feeling, however, that I'll be told to stay while the current people there move on. I don't understand how it can be in the company's best interest to cut a new person loose alone in an area where the current workers are doing just fine and can work ten times faster. I don't know how I'll be able to handle that area plus my IT responsibilities. They ask too much of me.
For the Fourth of July, my workplace was closed for about 48 hours. Of course, my shift was the very first shift back to work last Wednesday. It was a mess. The power had accidentally been cut for a few seconds during the shutdown and hundreds of machines that weren't supposed to be turned off were. When the power came back, some machines began asking for chemicals from machines that didn't survive the outage, causing more failure. Chaos. I was told to handle IT stuff all shift and -- amongst dozens of other glitches and issues -- replaced four computers whose power supplies were fried during the power loss. It was my busiest night ever. At the end at 6 AM, one of the guys in the real IT department caught me on my way out and we chatted about the night for a while. He seemed insanely impressed. I think this IT thing, which allows me to help other people and be the hero on a daily basis, is something that could be aligned with what I'd like to do with my life. Who knows.
So at this moment I'm dealing with two health issues. The first one is this occasional pain in my right side just below my rib cage that's been a hassle since February. Not so much painful, but an annoying soreness like a torn or twisted muscle. Last week, my new doctor sent me to get an ultrasound on my gut. What an experience that was! Cold. And scary. But the results came back with great news. My gut is, according to the experts, normal and extremely healthy. However, the pain persists, so I guess the next step is a colonoscopy. Weee.
The other issue is the discovery that my thyroid is out of whack. The same doctor prescribed pills for me to take once a day every day for the rest of my life. I don't feel like trusting such a radical lifestyle change on just one single blood test, so today I'm going to see a different doctor for a second opinion and to have a more thorough thyroid panel blood test taken. This test will check all the chemicals involved with thyroid function and will definitively diagnose me. If I am to take a pill every day for the rest of time, so be it, I just need to know for sure.
EMO MOMENT! Isn't it ironic? I take GREAT care of myself. Never once took any drugs, never once smoked, rarely drink, no sugar, no fatty foods, I eat more fruits and veg than most of my friends, and in the end I wind up with asthma and a thyroid dysfunction, both of which will have me on daily meds for the rest of my life. And I'm not even thirty yet. But I don't want to sound like a complainer or a woe-is-me downer. What actually really disappoints me is that I'll now need to work hard to keep health insurance for the rest of my life to pay for the pills. No longer will I be able to lapse. Not that anyone would want to, but everyone else reading this might understand the freedom that exists when you don't absolutely need a prescription like I will every month for the rest of my life.
So it's mid-July, which means the apartment I was waiting for at Murrayhill should be available! Yesterday, I called them up to schedule a walk-through and I learned they'd already leased out the apartment I had my eye on. Eeek! Not even available yet and they've already got a new tenant sight unseen. This apartment hunting thing is gonna be harder than I thought. The next available apartment at Murrayhill is in September...
Another disappointment I'm dealing with right now is the loss of a "time capsule" in the form of a hard drive I'd been holding onto since late 2003. At that time, this hard drive was my main Macintosh computer drive and one day it simply stopped working and made only clicking noises. Couldn't get the files off of it. It was shot. Initially, data recovery companies wanted thousands of dollars to recover the hard drive, so I simply put it away in a safe place waiting for a time when I could afford it. I don't even remember what's on the thing. Maybe my old music collection, every digital photo I'd taken up until that point, work files from my first three years at EOU, dozens of ideas for short films and also lots of personal emails and trinkets from my life in college. After all these years, I've finally got the money and the desire to pay for a recovery and see what's on this time capsule of a hard drive. I found a place in New England that would do a recovery for a modest fee and I sent the drive off. Sadly, when it arrived and their team began looking at it, they had bad news for me.
The drive had failed in such a way that the platters themselves have been scratched in a crucial place. Without the damaged area of the data platter, no recovery is possible without going to a larger corporation to have it done with super-specialized tools for upwards of five thousand dollars. Is the data on that drive worth that much money? I realized that I've lived eight years without that stuff and I can't think of anything on that drive worth even one percent of that dollar amount. And that's even if the big boys can fix it. Odds are, they'd get a handful of files and still demand the full price. So I'll probably tell my New England team to simply destroy the drive instead of paying to have it returned. This is good closure. Sad, yes, but at least now I know. I held onto that drive for so long wondering what treasures were on it, but now I realize I have new treasures and I just don't need that old data at all. I'm glad I know this saga is finally over. Just like so many things in my life right now, I simply needed to know for sure. Let this be a lesson to everyone: Backup your stuff!
Ohh yea, and PS: Jaci might be moving back to the northwest......
For the Fourth of July, my workplace was closed for about 48 hours. Of course, my shift was the very first shift back to work last Wednesday. It was a mess. The power had accidentally been cut for a few seconds during the shutdown and hundreds of machines that weren't supposed to be turned off were. When the power came back, some machines began asking for chemicals from machines that didn't survive the outage, causing more failure. Chaos. I was told to handle IT stuff all shift and -- amongst dozens of other glitches and issues -- replaced four computers whose power supplies were fried during the power loss. It was my busiest night ever. At the end at 6 AM, one of the guys in the real IT department caught me on my way out and we chatted about the night for a while. He seemed insanely impressed. I think this IT thing, which allows me to help other people and be the hero on a daily basis, is something that could be aligned with what I'd like to do with my life. Who knows.
So at this moment I'm dealing with two health issues. The first one is this occasional pain in my right side just below my rib cage that's been a hassle since February. Not so much painful, but an annoying soreness like a torn or twisted muscle. Last week, my new doctor sent me to get an ultrasound on my gut. What an experience that was! Cold. And scary. But the results came back with great news. My gut is, according to the experts, normal and extremely healthy. However, the pain persists, so I guess the next step is a colonoscopy. Weee.
The other issue is the discovery that my thyroid is out of whack. The same doctor prescribed pills for me to take once a day every day for the rest of my life. I don't feel like trusting such a radical lifestyle change on just one single blood test, so today I'm going to see a different doctor for a second opinion and to have a more thorough thyroid panel blood test taken. This test will check all the chemicals involved with thyroid function and will definitively diagnose me. If I am to take a pill every day for the rest of time, so be it, I just need to know for sure.
EMO MOMENT! Isn't it ironic? I take GREAT care of myself. Never once took any drugs, never once smoked, rarely drink, no sugar, no fatty foods, I eat more fruits and veg than most of my friends, and in the end I wind up with asthma and a thyroid dysfunction, both of which will have me on daily meds for the rest of my life. And I'm not even thirty yet. But I don't want to sound like a complainer or a woe-is-me downer. What actually really disappoints me is that I'll now need to work hard to keep health insurance for the rest of my life to pay for the pills. No longer will I be able to lapse. Not that anyone would want to, but everyone else reading this might understand the freedom that exists when you don't absolutely need a prescription like I will every month for the rest of my life.
So it's mid-July, which means the apartment I was waiting for at Murrayhill should be available! Yesterday, I called them up to schedule a walk-through and I learned they'd already leased out the apartment I had my eye on. Eeek! Not even available yet and they've already got a new tenant sight unseen. This apartment hunting thing is gonna be harder than I thought. The next available apartment at Murrayhill is in September...
Another disappointment I'm dealing with right now is the loss of a "time capsule" in the form of a hard drive I'd been holding onto since late 2003. At that time, this hard drive was my main Macintosh computer drive and one day it simply stopped working and made only clicking noises. Couldn't get the files off of it. It was shot. Initially, data recovery companies wanted thousands of dollars to recover the hard drive, so I simply put it away in a safe place waiting for a time when I could afford it. I don't even remember what's on the thing. Maybe my old music collection, every digital photo I'd taken up until that point, work files from my first three years at EOU, dozens of ideas for short films and also lots of personal emails and trinkets from my life in college. After all these years, I've finally got the money and the desire to pay for a recovery and see what's on this time capsule of a hard drive. I found a place in New England that would do a recovery for a modest fee and I sent the drive off. Sadly, when it arrived and their team began looking at it, they had bad news for me.
The drive had failed in such a way that the platters themselves have been scratched in a crucial place. Without the damaged area of the data platter, no recovery is possible without going to a larger corporation to have it done with super-specialized tools for upwards of five thousand dollars. Is the data on that drive worth that much money? I realized that I've lived eight years without that stuff and I can't think of anything on that drive worth even one percent of that dollar amount. And that's even if the big boys can fix it. Odds are, they'd get a handful of files and still demand the full price. So I'll probably tell my New England team to simply destroy the drive instead of paying to have it returned. This is good closure. Sad, yes, but at least now I know. I held onto that drive for so long wondering what treasures were on it, but now I realize I have new treasures and I just don't need that old data at all. I'm glad I know this saga is finally over. Just like so many things in my life right now, I simply needed to know for sure. Let this be a lesson to everyone: Backup your stuff!
Ohh yea, and PS: Jaci might be moving back to the northwest......