An uneventful trip back to New Zealand, only marred by the discovery that I was somehow working a long day the day after my return.
I know I’m short on leave but that seemed like ridiculously bad planning. Ah well. In preparation, I stayed up yesterday afternoon on our return home, and unpacked while Simon snoozed. He was clever enough to take the rest of the week off. In fairness, obviously working Tuesday was a dumb idea. Then, he doesn’t like his Wednesdays, which are a long day for him, and after that it’s already Thursday, which is just about the end of the week for him as he doesn’t work Fridays. It’s just logical.
I even went to the usual Monday evening film society movie, although I must confess it was a rather confusing Canadian production, with everyone speaking Persian for some reason, albeit with subtitles. I briefly nodded off several times during the screening but I don’t think it made a material difference to the comprehensibility of the plot.
I went to bed at the usual time, and slept pretty well, apart from a fairly standard period of wakefulness around 3 am. I got up with my alarm and went to work and coped pretty well. Then I saw an automated email in my inbox, asking me to confirm that I was taking the day off. It turns out I did apply for leave, and it was granted, too. My name was definitely in the leave book, but at some point the department 2IC had failed to remove me from the list of available workers, and my colleagues in the scheduling office, completely unaware, had put me in to work as usual. Of course, in his defence, I should have checked my leave at some point before turning up for work, and even more importantly, in the spirit of “it’s the putting right that counts”, he actually offered to work the evening shift for me, which I gratefully accepted when I realised just how impaired I probably was. Thanks Geoff! I wouldn’t do your job for the world.
While I was overseas, there’s been a changeover of the junior doctors in the department, and I met many of them for the first time today. I was wearing my brand new Gustav Klimt lanyard, and one of the juniors pointed out that she had the same one. It turns out she was in Vienna last Friday, went to the Belvedere art gallery and bought the exact same lanyard as me.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that there’s no such thing as a coincidence, but I don’t know what you would call that otherwise! Although, she wasn’t wearing the matching socks that I had on, or the tonally complimentary scrub hat. Possibly she’s better at masking her autistic tendencies than me.