women are hard to please

I'm beginning to get settled in the job and I think I am performing quite well despite the environment which leaves one sometimes 'psychologically uncomfortable for normal people' to quote a colleague. I'm beginning to love all my colleagues and having met those from other departments - IT desk, Ops Projects, Corp Comms, Finance, Legal, Nursing... I have to say that they are the nicest people I've met - open, opinionated in a good way, dedicated. I'm beginning to appreciate why I wanted to join a hospital in the first place. Plus, many people wear VERY casual, so I get away with not-formal-at-all flat shoes and the like. In fact what would hardly pass for corporate wear in the CBD area gets full marks here.

And there are less politics that what one would expect in a corporate quasi gahmen environment. Truly, I can't get used to the paperwork - CC-ing everyone on emails, doing complicated stuff on Excel - I realized my office skills are at a bare minimum having not used Excel at all in the last few years... thankfully there are nice colleagues to patiently explain to me about them...

I'm in a romantic mood these days. Perhaps now that I am busy and lacking in time - once again the weekends seem so short - I start to see the little lovely things in life. Eating at food courts only is hard for me, each week I have to escape to Subway and have a sandwich. On my second visit I saw the seat next to me being 'choped' by a stethoscope... seeing it, I was enthused... a lonesome stethoscope being placed gingerly on a green upholstered seating... first time in my life I have seen that. And in this unique environment, we see things that touch us. Coming out of the toilet today, I saw a lady in a wheelchair with no legs. Both legs were amputated at the knee. My office is next to the 'foot and limb design centre', I see people with 'designed' foot and sports limbs, the type of black titanium looking ones used for sprinting. You get a sense of your own mortality when you see people being wheeled around on beds and recognizing The Church's pastors - each week I have seen a different one, coming to offer prayers for the sick.

I am also touched because I got my first sponsor, a kind man who once helped me in my schooldays. He sponsored 3 bales of cloth, 150 yards in total. That would amount to a few hundreds of dollars. Of course you may think that it's rejected goods or flawed stock, that may be true. But there are still people who won't donate or who are not into giving even out of their surplus. So I was very impressed and touched when he immediately agreed after hearing our project's needs. I met very nice staff who took up the donation bags and went around their department collecting spare change and even suggested the $ be taken out of their pay every month. I got to know of little old ladies who spend their time doing craftwork with long-term bedridden people like those with TB. Sigh! In all honestly, I am not one of those volunteer-oriented kind souls. Maybe once or twice a year. But if you ask me to volunteer weekly like them, I would definitely not. The life experience of working in this job, as in my last job (also involved hospitals), is probably priceless.