This work week started with me being disturbed at seven in the morning, as I was trying to lose myself in the music that was playing through my headphones; a homeless-looking middle-aged man had gone out of his way to sit in front of me in a mostly empty train car and then reached over, attempting to touch me. I raised my voice at the prick to say something like, “hey, what the fuck are you doing?”, which attracted the attention of the only woman sitting nearby (who was so young that she may have been a high school student, but I can’t tell these days; many of the nurses I come across at work look like high school students).

The man babbled incoherently while staring at me as if I were about to punch him, which I would have loved to do, as I hate being touched in general, and in particular by random men. To be honest, I’d love to pummel into a paste plenty of people throughout any given week, but I don’t want to get arrested. In the end I just stood up and walked away. I sat at the other end of the train car. The woman must have become the next target of the guy, or she simply wasn’t comfortable, because she followed me and sat nearby. I did feel a bit better knowing that this (hot) young woman considered me a better option to sit next to than a rambling, homeless-looking man.

Ever since I bought these headphones, I’ve had a few cases of people trying to have a conversation with me or wanting to ask me for information while I’m wearing big headphones, often while being surrounded by people who are clearly not wearing headphones. Are people retarded? Do they enjoy going out of their way to inconvenience and bother strangers?

Regarding my current novel, for two days in a row I have sat in front of my notes for the next chapter, but I’ve been unable to write a single word. It’s not due to “writer’s block”, which I don’t believe exists (that supposed problem is about not knowing what to write, usually because of lack of planning or simply because nothing comes to you, which means that you shouldn’t be writing anyway). I’m simply too mentally drained from work.

Getting anything done in the afternoons after work is always a struggle, but these two weeks I’ll be lucky if I do anything productive, because I’m on phone duty. In our office you are only supposed to be on phone duty a week out of several, but they ended up exchanging my original schedule for that of one of my coworkers, because he’ll have to drive around the province to solve thorny issues, and I don’t have a car (nor can/should drive because of my neurological problems).

Our province has announced the next round of “vaccine boosting”. Mostly pensioners are lining up to get jabbed, which will possibly boost their defenses against the biological weapon, and potentially cause them other permanent issues, including death (the latest booster gave me atrial fibrillation, a permanent heart issue). In any case, our hospital complex is the HQ that is supposed to handle the computer problems of way smaller clinics located in a twenty or so kilometer radius. That’s a terrible idea, because every clinic should have at least one or two technicians of their own; the doctors and nurses who work in clinics complain constantly about that, as if we could do anything about it.

Although our bosses had been informed beforehand about which towns were going to open vaccination centers, in order to set up their systems, these past couple of days we’ve received frantic calls from random clinics where the nurses can’t figure out how to organize themselves or use the computers they’ve found in storage to open their vaccination centers, which nobody had informed that were going to be opened. When we told them to talk to their supervisors so they would contact with our bosses (so they would explain, to begin with, why the hell they hadn’t informed that a vaccination center would open in their clinic), a few of those nurses told me that they didn’t know who was in charge.

Do you have any clue how hard/maddeningly absurd it is to have to solve the computer issues of PCs you can’t connect to remotely? Those vaccination centers mostly use laptops, and they call us to figure out how to connect to the WiFi through USB devices. They are usually given written/printed instructions, but they lose them, or simply refuse to read them. Some can’t seem to follow simple instructions.

We also receive calls from nurses and doctors who are trying to work remotely from home; just yesterday I got a call from someone who had been authorized to work from home, but “it doesn’t work”. As I was walking her through the process of entering her username and password, I ended up realizing that she wasn’t reading the couple of sentences that clearly explained that she had to mark the checkbox to accept the terms and conditions, or else it wouldn’t let her into the system. People blatantly refusing to read what’s on the screen even as they are trying to explain to you the problem they have encountered is a common issue; it’s like plenty of people are half-blind but refuse to admit it, or are simply that obscenely idiotic.

Apart from the constant annoyance of dealing with humans who want their problems to be solved right now, the act of interacting with people just squeezes my remaining energy, so I return home utterly drained. These past two days I had no choice but to give up on my attempts at writing. I got in bed, put my fancy headphones on, covered my head with the sheets, and allowed my brain to drift off into daydreams as I listened either to music or to ASMR. Lying in bed half-lost in elaborate hallucinations feels so good that I’m tempted to believe that those people sleep deprived for days in a row risk dying just because the process of existing in this world is unbearable unless you get those (hopefully) eight hours-long breaks in between.

Unfortunately, my regular dreams would likely count as nightmares for most people. I’ve forgotten the details of last night’s dream, but I know it involved walking around some ungraspable setting while trying to solve some problem under duress. I woke up exhausted, which is a wonderful way to start a workday.

Anyway, I’m at work, and I have written this shit between calls. I better get back to writing fiction soon; my psyche is a house of cards, and living vicariously through my fictional characters is the only thing that nowadays keeps it from collapsing.