Relieving the tedium by writing something tedious...

It’s been too long, once again! I guess working 2 jobs, house-sitting, having a social life and trying to keep up to date with university work caught up to me! To tell the truth, I could probably have managed to blog, if I’d made an effort to, but I pretty much avoided computers in general, except at work, or to watch dvds, or to do the mind-numbing and cripplingly boring task of data entry.

I’m at the vet at the moment. The joy of working during the week is that it’s pretty quiet, and the first 3(of 6) hours of the shift are when the vet isn’t open for consultations. So basically if someone wants a prescription refilled or to buy a bag of dog food, I’m your girl, but other than that I plug in my trusty laptop and get paid to get my work done.

Not so today. I as afraid that there might be a few bits of admin for me, last week the computer system crashed and so the practise was running manually for a few days (not the playing solitaire manually, but also giving out meds, and consults and food and and and…) so I expected to have to enter some stuff.

Instead I arrived to find a rather gigantic stack of microchip forms waiting for me, with a note on it (the joy of the vets not being available for 3 hours is that if they’re not doing surgeries I don’t see them for the first few hours unless something explodes or something). It turns out that one of the people who works here isn’t very good about putting the ID numbers into the computer system. This creates problems as runaway dogs from the area are pretty likely to be brought in to this practise where in all likelihood they were microchipped in the first place. So we scan them, check the ID number against our records, find no match and then call the national database people for information, only to find out that the dog lives 2 blocks away from us and it’s all rather embarassing.

So I got to spend my afternoon with a pile of all the microchip forms since 2003, checking the numbers, entering the missing ones and cross referencing them with the dog or cat, and checking the phone numbers and addresses on the system. It was horrible! It took me two and a half hours! And then of course, when I finished, after a celebratory cup of coffee with one of Candice’s excellent Hannumas (I REFUSE to bow to the O.C) biscuits the floodgates opened and everyone in the world decided to get their animals checked out. That lasted for an hour and then it calmed down, but I’m so tired from the monotony of imputting 10-digit codes (letters and numbers) that I can’t bring myself to do any actual work.

The neighbourhood has a fair number of businesses, and so a lot of them have put adverts around a free calendar that I get to hand out. I just noticed that one of them is for “Dr Flush plumbing services” which is complete with a picture of a devil’s tail… I will have to get a photo tomorrow!

In other news, Christmas was the usual family overload, but fun. I got the cutest tripod EVER and bought my brother’s camera from him (bought in the sense that I have it, not that I’ve paid him yet). I haven’t really done too much playing, but it’s my first SLR camera and I’m really excited! Unfortunately in order to pay for it I have to work a ridiculous number of daylight hours and so the playing must wait.
New Years was awesome but exhausting, particularly since I was rushing backwards and forwards between where I was house-sitting, home, friends’ houses and work things re winding up for the start of the year now and I’m a bit nervous about all the work I have to do this year! I can’t believe last year went by so quickly, even if I was off on fieldwork for a third of it!

Not too exciting I’m afraid, I’ll try to think of some of the funny stuff that happened and post it later!