I Survived Today

I 'trained' 5 people on our new chemistry analyzer today. I talked for nearly 9 hours. My throat is dry and sore.

When I say 'trained', I mean I gave a very hasty intro. 4 hours per session is not enough time to really go in depth, you know what I mean? This is a huge machine.

Still, people thanked me and told me they found out more info than from one of the other trainers. Which made me feel good, but I still feel like people are getting cheated out of the full experience.

I guess I don't have too much longer to feel that way, because we'll all get the 'full' experience when we go live with this damn thing in a couple of weeks. We're all going to have to get really good, really fast. And a lot of this stuff that's coming out of my mouth isn't going to make sense until we're hooked up with the hospital computer system, and we're running actual specimens.

But I feel today was a gigantic hurdle. I was so nervous this morning going in, I could barely think straight. I didn't feel like crying or getting sick, but I was just in a...*state*. I hadn't slept well, and I when I did sleep I had bad dreams/nightmares about work/training.

I had to give myself many pep talks this morning. None of that bad stuff happened, and you know, people are usually satisfied with a short, glossed-over answer anyway. And people are being pretty good-natured right now, with a 'what the hell' kind of attitude. Like we're all going to get through this. Somehow. Wait till we go live and we'll see how THAT goes.

Now the rest of the evening is mine. There is crap to do around the house (unpacking from camping, watering plants, putting on drawer pulls in the basement, buying flowers for the yard, me getting a long-overdue haircut, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning....), but I don't even care. I was so glad to have gotten this one first day of me training people over with. Sadly, Karl will not be stopping by tonight to do drywall repair, like we'd originally planned. He's too busy today. But he will be coming tomorrow, and for several days after that to put the basement kitchen back to rights again. Hopefully I'll get to see him before I have to leave for my bizarre shift tomorrow, which involves me starting at 6pm and getting out at 2am. More training. That's closer to my own time zone, and believe me, I can't get back to working nights fast enough. I have just not taken to working during the day. I had to take back roads all the way home again because the highway traffic was backed up.

Hey, now, don't even give me that look. I have some quite legitimate questions for Karl.

How was our camping trip? Nice, if a little uninspiring. I guess I can't have non-stop excitement all the time. These are old friends, and it was the old comforting pattern of eating, drinking, talking around the campfire, slowly whiling away the day and keeping an eye on everyone else's dogs. Their owners' yelling at them to stay close did get on my last nerve a few times, and the noises from other campers in the campground late into the night, but for the most part it was a nice trip. Harrison is a small town in the upper to middle part of Michigan's lower peninsula, and it's pretty much a quiet fishing/tourist town. A slice of Hometown America.

Our trip home was a bit stressful, however. Midway home, Tim decided to check his cell phone messages. To make a long story short, all family members within an hour of us had gotten phone calls from our security system around 9am that morning alerting them that someone had tripped our alarm system. No other information, just enough to scare everyone. My brother was worried and called, and Tim's parents and my mom were so worried they jumped in a car and headed down to our house. Did the security home office call us first? Apparently not. They must have called every contact on our list, except US.


After being trapped with all the other highway lemmings in holiday traffic, we finally got home and found out from the neighbors what happened. They'd seen our garage door open all weekend, and called the police. The cop went inside, (gun drawn!) and tripped the alarm the second he opened the door. How our garage door had been open, we have no idea, because it was shut when we pulled out with the camper Friday afternoon.

So here it was the police themselves who had set the alarm, everyone got concerned for nothing, and we took our parents out for dinner for their trouble of coming down and wanting to check on things. I guess from now on we'll be alerting at least one neighbor and family member when we leave on even the smallest of weekend trips where the hell we're going to be. And the security company is going to get a talking-to about what phone numbers to call, and in what order. We probably ought to buy those neighbors a thank-you gift for looking out for us.

Current music: 'Laudate Dominum' by Mozart, played by Joshua Bell