Given the astronomical federal debt and the exorbitant amount of money our beloved Uncle continues to spend every year, you’d be forgiven for thinking that our offices must be filled with premium furniture. If you were to actually walk around the average federal office, though, you’d be disabused of that notion fairly quickly.
Our cube farms are filled with the kind of low-bidder junk I’d be embarrassed to have seen in my home. I suppose there’s really no way to make a sea of cubicles look stylish or comfortable, but it’s obvious that it’s not even really a consideration. I’m currently sitting in a budget type office chair that was bought about 12 years ago when these buildings were first raised from the swampy shores of the Chesapeake.
I didn’t realize how bad our in-office seating options were until the plague set in. One of my first orders of business when work from home became the rule rather than the exception was to set myself up with a really nice chair. Sure, I got mine at a questionably deep discount from an entirely dubious source deep in the post-apocalyptic looking docklands of Wilmington, Delaware… but that’s beside the point here. The simple truth is having a properly designed, if expensive, place to sit made a world of difference in what otherwise devolved into regular pain from my upper back to my tailbone.
Since echelons higher than reality decided it’s important that we spend lots of time back on the cube farm six months ago, I was feeling every day of it thanks to my low-bidder, decade-old office chair. However, thanks to a thoughtful note from my doctor and my willingness to be a pain in the ass by requesting a workplace accommodation in hopes of making my back feel a little less like shattered glass, I’ve got a spanking new twin to the chair I’ve been enjoying at home. Well… “have” is a word that gets us into trouble. I’m assured it’s somewhere in the building and was going to be delivered before I closed up shop for the day. Close of business came and went without me catching site of my new seat. It’s the kind of Johnny on the spot services I’ve come to rely on from the United States Government.
I could have saved our Uncle about $1000 if they’d have just let me pull $300 in petty cash and head over to my shady source of supply in Wilmington, but hey, that seems to be frowned upon by resource managers… so, full retail it is. My fancy new Steelcraft Leap isn’t going to make days in cubicle hell any better, but it will help prevent them from inadvertently being any worse, so that’s something.
First though, I’ve got to get the thing from receiving and then inevitably spend more time than seems necessary figuring out how to put it together. Then I can take the thing for a proper test drive and enjoy that new chair smell.
Category Archives: Health
This is how it ends for me (probably)…
I’ve managed to avoid the Great Plague for the last three years. Staying home and avoiding crowded places wasn’t exactly a radical departure from my normal lifestyle. Still, I’m sure that was the secret to my success at entirely missing a dread virus that ripped around the world leaving millions dead in its wake.
If I’m going to at long last be brought low by whatever COVID variant is now quietly circulating out there, I’m entirely sure I’m now deeply ensconced in the petri dish that will give it to me. I’m sitting here with up to 700 assholes who just couldn’t wait to show up and hang out in an auditorium breathing stagnant air while some other bunch of assholes reads them slides word for word for 8 hours a day across three successive days.
What reptilian brain fuckery drives people to want to show up and sit around when the information could be entirely available on a basic website or, gods forbid, through an online meeting, I will never, ever understand. As far as I’m concerned, the “human element” is entirely overrated.
This is the classic meeting that could have been an email writ extraordinarily large.
On involuntary expulsion and other treats…
I’ve started the last two weeks with some variety of sickness. I’ve got to tell you, I’m pretty much over it.
This morning, I woke up just shy of 3 AM with that undeniable salivating feeling that what had heretofore been in my stomach was about to make an unruly appearance. Working in my favor was that I eat Sunday dinner at the geriatric hour of 5 PM so there just wasn’t that much to work through. Still, twenty minutes later, with sweat beaded forehead, unwashoutable mouth, and a nose dripping blood, the worst of it was apparently over. The rest of the early morning hours passed uneventfully – if given over to a decidedly unsettled stomach.
As long as I stay away from the heavy-duty peppers, I usually have a cast iron constitution when it comes to food. I have no idea what may have gotten into me yesterday to light this mess off. There was certainly no unusual or suspect food coming out of the kitchen. The culprit will most likely remain a mystery so long as there’s no encore performances.
I’ve passed most of the day today feeling somewhere between tired and wiped out – not conventionally sick, which was nice – but dangerously close to toppling over the keyboard and sleeping for hours. Mercifully it was Telework Monday so I didn’t need to make the effort to look even marginally presentable but still managed to keep the bits and bobs running smoothly without slagging off the work on someone else… something that definitely wouldn’t have been the case if I had been expected to appear in cubicle hell personally this morning.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling absolutely ravenous… and am probably going to tempt fate by eating something with more heft than three saltines. Wish me luck.
A low-grade crud…
I went from March 2020 to December 2021 without so much as a cough. I can trace my Christmas crud last year directly to the one time I strayed out from normal habits of avoiding people. Believe me when I tell you I was good at avoiding people before COVID. After COVID, I’ve become exceptional… of course that assumes a situation where I exert some level of control over most of the variables.
I’m in no way surprised that six weeks after “return to the office” I already find myself dealing with a low-grade crud. You wouldn’t be surprised either if you heard the general amount of background hacking, sniffling, and general complaints that “it’s probably just a cold,” floating around the cube farm on any given day.
The good news is that as long as the handy little at home tests can be trusted, it’s probably a run of the mill cold and not the Great Plague. The bad news, of course, is the only reason I’ve got a head full of anything just now is because my corner of the great green machine continues to obstinately cling to the idea that work is a place rather than an activity despite two years of evidence to the contrary.
If you’re wondering when I’ll stop being salty about this world where asses in seats continues to be a more important metric than production, well, I won’t… and I don’t even need this periodic upper respiratory reminder to keep it in the forefront of my mind.
Half a sick day…
I took some sick leave this morning largely because I had a doctor’s appointment. In my head, though, that was just an invitation to “maximize” my use of sick time. As the only variety of leave that accumulates forever and can then be used to add time to your years of service at the end of your career, the stuff is precious. I try to dole it out as infrequently as possible.
Since I was already going to be at the medical center, it only made sense to head across the street to get my blood drawn for a different appointment I have scheduled at the end of the month. And hey, since there’s a pharmacy at the opposite end of the shopping plaza, I might as well walk down there to see if they’ll dose me with a flu shot and the new and improved COVID booster.
I had the very best of intentions here. I mean, from a time management perspective, knocking out all those things within 500 yards of each other makes eminent sense. What I failed to account for, however, was the net effect overall of two vaccinations, losing 7 or 8 vials of blood, having fasted for 16 hours, and there being absolutely no caffeine in my system. Let’s just say I spent a good part of the rest of the day feeling vaguely “muddled.”
After a couple of meals and a bottomless mug of tea, I’m feeling well enough for my troubles now. This evening, I’m mostly wondering if I’ll have the same reaction to Pfizer’s bivalent dose as I had to the two boosters from Moderna. If I do, sometime around 10 AM tomorrow morning my body will throw the switch from “feeling fine” to “feeling like hot microwaved trash” and that situation will persist for about 12 hours.
That’s all a very wordy way of saying that I think I over scheduled the day today. Some things make perfect sense in terms of efficiency, but it pays to not forget checking in with other factors, too. It would have been nice to have that in mind this morning, but here we are.
A look back, fondly…
I miss the early days of the Great Plague. Chalk that up to yet another unpopular opinion, but I said what I said.
I miss the complete lack of traffic on the roads during those moments when I couldn’t avoid leaving the house. I miss the wide berth that everyone gave one another as they scurried through the grocery store, masked, and avoiding eye contact. I miss living my best life “safer at home.”
For a guy who has never had much use for people at the very best of times, those days were a glimpse into a world I never imagined could exist. Despite the lingering threat of sudden and unexpected death lurking on the breath of every passerby, my blood pressure went down and my general level of annoyance became almost entirely manageable. You might even be forgiven for taking the impression that I enjoyed it.
Look, I’m not sociopathic enough to advocate for having ongoing, continuous waves of deadly virus spreading around the world just to make me more comfortable, but it has painted me a picture of a world that could be. The lately departed plague season feels increasingly like a preview of the world I’d want to build myself once I get past the stage of life that involves trading time for money. After that it’s venture out for food, venture out for books, and to hell with most everything else.
I wouldn’t have suspected it at the time, but it seems that those first, uncertain days of the plague will be the ones I look back on most fondly.
I’m pretty sure it’s a racket…
Tomorrow will start the first of a series of various doctor visits and lab appointments that I really had been hoping would somehow magically fall off my calendar. I’m sure they’re all very important and will reveal many interesting and entertaining things, but it’s a level of shit to do and sick leave I don’t want to burn off that’s just uninspiring.
A month or two ago I got myself an endocrinologist, who seems nice enough, but is determined to build her own history rather than just going on the eleven years of records I sent over from Johns Hopkins. So, over the next six to eight weeks, I’ve got multiple appointments lined up for basic blood work, thyroid testing, pituitary testing, a “nutrition assessment,” and one or two other things I’ve got noted as “Endo Appointment – UNK” on the calendar. I assume they’ll tell me what I’m there for. At this point, it only feels like I’m missing tests for color blindness and hearing.
The good news, I suppose, is as far as I know there’s nothing new actually “wrong” with me. The doc didn’t appear alarmed and used phrases like “establish a baseline.” Since I feel fine, my numbers are basically hanging around where they have been for a decade, and they didn’t immediately throw me in the hospital to conduct these tests, I’m proceeding from the assumption that this is either a) standard procedure for bringing a new patient into the practice or b) an unsophisticated scam to bleed me for copays while charging Blue Cross a small fortune. Either one feels entirely possible at this point – and both feel like some kind of a racket.
Now that the bathroom is in spitting distance of being done, I thought maybe this would be the time to get back to the series of dermatologist appointments I paused in the spring. Turns out that was wildly optimistic. Maybe I’ll see him again in November… assuming there isn’t some other ridiculous thing that comes up between now and then.
The open bay petri dish…
Since March 2020, I’ve taken the reasonably prescribed precautions against the Great Plague. The regular advice to avoid crowded spaces didn’t feel particularly onerous to me. After all, avoiding crowded places has been my stock in trade for most of my adult life. It’s the kind of crisis situation I was built for.
When the bosses prioritize asses in seats, though, there’s no way to avoid the office, which is how you get a poor schlub coming in when he’s not feeling 100% and only hours later popping hot on a rapid test. That, of course, leads to the rest of us sitting around wondering if that brief conversation we had in the early hours of the morning was enough to swing us from exposed to infected. There’s no way to tell until something does or doesn’t happen, so we all just keep on keeping on.
I miss the front half of the plague experience. A positive test like this would have triggered an immediate quarantine and deep cleaning of the physical space. Anyone in the room would have been declared “exposed” and sent home to quarantine for as long as 14 days. Now guidance from the top is “Well, we just have to tell you that you may have been exposed” and an accompanying shrug.
Having been vaccinated and boosted, it’s reasonable to assume the plague isn’t going to be my cause of death. That shouldn’t be taken to mean it’s an experience I particularly want to have. Given the couple of underlying conditions I enjoy that don’t necessarily play nicely with the plague, it’s in my best interest to avoid it. If I catch this bug after two and a half years only because someone at echelons higher than reality is mired in the misguided notion that there’s anything at all I can do sitting at my desk in cubicle hell that I can’t do from my desk in the sunroom at home, there’s a fair chance I’ll absolutely lose my shit the very next time someone mentions some absolute tripe like “synergy, collaboration, and innovation” and the importance of having all the warm bodies back in an open bay petri dish.
Not what I signed up for…
A few months ago, my doctor started hectoring me to schedule an appointment with a nutritionist. The guy cured some recurring foot pain I was having years ago with the power of positive thinking, so I’m usually game for anything he wants to try.
Let me start off by saying I could probably have gotten a cardiology appointment more quickly that I was able to get something scheduled with a local nutritionist. I made the appointment so long ago that I’d honestly forgotten about it. In fact, it wasn’t until my boss mentioned this morning that I was scheduled off this afternoon that I remembered it at all. That’s not the finest hour for my long-term memory, but I made it on time today so at least I have that going for me.
I’m not sure what the doc expected me to learn. Eat less, exercise more, knock it off with the red meat and gin. I’m perfectly willing to admit intellectually that I should be exercising an hour a day or that I should be eating low-calorie, flavor-free foods. But the simple fact remains that a) That’s not how I want to allocate my limited free time and b) I like foods that don’t taste like someone smeared cottage cheese on cardboard. I’m well aware that I’m taking years off my life… but I’m not at all sure that the cost of adding years is worth what joys I’d be expected to give up.
This all would have been a fine use of an afternoon, except for the part where when I called requesting an appointment with a nutritionist, the nice people at Christiana instead made me an appointment with an endocrinologist. She was pleasant enough, I suppose, but far more interested in sending me off for a round of all the bloodwork than discussing how to make low-fat lasagna that doesn’t taste worse than the box in which the noodles arrive. I’m pretty sure that’s not what my doc or I really had in mind… but she said her office will be happy to refer me to a nutritionist, so I guess I’ll just go ahead and build a whole suite of medical professionals while I’m waiting on that to happen.
Sometimes it’s increasingly difficult to tell if I’m the sane one and the world has gone mad, or if the world is sane and I’ve lost my mind. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference.
Slice and dice…
Over the last three months or so, I’ve been spending time with a local dermatologist. Fortunately, he’s not treating me for anything traumatic or catching, but we’re working through a pretty large number of skin tags that have annoyed me for years, but that I’ve never had the time, inclination, or, frankly, the ready cash to do much about. BlueCross is very clear that it’s the kind of thing they consider cosmetic, so anything done along these lines has to be fully out of pocket.
I would tell you that I’m not vain, but that’s obviously not entirely true. I have plenty of vanities, they’re just generally not the physical kind. Whatever else it may be, I’ve long considered my body just the meat suit responsible for hauling my brain around from Point A to Point B. As long as it’s managing to get that job done, it’s good enough. These little tags we’re working on now were starting to be an issue even in my general disinterest.
So, for the last three appointments, we’ve been trying to kill them with blistering cold. That has met with some limited success. Looking at the progress to date, the doc wasn’t happy – and in honesty nether was I. So, today was the last round of that approach. In three or four weeks, instead of the fancy cryo gun, we’ll be going with the more old-fashioned lidocaine and razor blade approach. As I understand it, where freezing is more akin to using a smart bomb, the razor is more like stepping up to wholesale carpet bombing.
Just now, well into this process, I’m willing increase the pain threshold in exchange for a shorter duration of effort. Sometime towards the end of June, I guess I’ll subject myself to a bit of slice and dice for purely cosmetic purposes. It turns out, my vanity isn’t as well controlled as I liked to imagine.
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