Day From Hell

I think I just had the most traumatic day of my life.

I don’t like not working. It’s fun for the first couple of days, but after that, one sinks into a grey Trainspotting mire of estate apathy. With this in mind, and the fact that the NHS will take forever and a day to sort out my induction, I decided to…*drum roll* temp for the next couple of weeks. I was offered an administrative post at the main city hospital (the one in which I have the job is in the suburbs) for a modest wage, but hey… it’s work, right?

Unfortunately, my leafy Glade of the Wolves village is hideously hard to get to Liverpool from. Well, before 8am, anyway. So, my body kept it real and refused to let me sleep all night. I forced myself out of bed at 6am to bathe and then shuffled to the bus stop at 7am. Bus turned up at 7.48am. Attempted to do Su-Doku, and ruined it because brain was half-dead. Got off at Page Moss, waited a further twenty minutes and got bus to hospital.

Hospital is the biggest, ugliest excuse for a 1960s building you have ever seen. Ever. Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction is Paris compared to it. And, of course, I’m working in the Gastroenterology Department. I realise I haven’t had breakfast, so nip to the Spar. End up having fecking Quavers crisps for breakfast.

There are two things in this world I hate more than spiders. One is lifts, the other is the word “bowels.” It’s the ultimate in disgusting onomatopoeia! I hear that word, and all I can think of is faeces sloshing around in someone’s gut.

Of course, my day revolves around bowels. I have to contact patients about bowel movements and rectal biopsies and loose motions. I am literally In the Shit. On top of this, the IT department are fecktards and won’t give me a password until they know everything about me, ever. So I have to sit there reading through fecking bowel correspondence because teh internets are forbidden and my Su-Doku book is tantalisingly out of reach. I busy myself making lists. All the places I’ve travelled to. The amount of money, less tax, I can expect at the end of the week. My top baby names. The words I hate. Bowels tops the list.

Lunchtime finally comes around, and I’m told that the city centre is not too far away. It’s walkable. Shyeah, right. But first there are the Lifts. I DUNT LIKE LIFTS. They’re metal coffins of D00m plunging the hapless passenger to their…er…doom. But there are people in the lift, so I don’t do my usual cowardly thing and take the stairs—I get in.

And the lift breaks. It doesn’t go to the first floor. It goes to ground. And then lower ground. And the doors won’t open. OMFG we’re all going to die! I can’t take it—my heart is being crushed by angry weasels. The girl in the lift screams, the other alerts the bored operator who tells her that the lifts “always fucking do this.” The lift starts to rise. Oh no, oh no, oh no, I’m going to die like Emilio Estevez in Mission Impossible! I’m going to diiiiiiiiiiiiie!

My companions gasp and I realise I’ve said this aloud. Of course, we get out, because my ghost sure as hell can’t work my computer. I stumble into the city centre, a mere half an hour’s work! Get lost on the way back because I took lift A,B,C when of course I should have taken X,Y,Z.

My colleagues tell me they thought I had run away. I smile, dazedly. My mind is still stuck in the steel trap o’D00m. At about 3 o’clock, I recover. The internet? Is blocked. Ahahaha.

I play Su-Doku on the way home. My evil sister with the loud mouth calls. She’s coming home! Tonight! She’ll keep me up all night and I have a long-standing dermatology appointment tomorrow! A chav sits at the back of the bus, smoking weed. I’m choking on it. My hair stinks of exhaled smoke. I should get up and give her a piece of my mind, but my mind has popped from the trauma of the day.