It’s eight in the evening and I’m stuck at work, thankfully alone because during the last two hours of the afternoon, I’m the only technician on duty. I have spent most of my spare time studying for an upcoming test on the 16th, but I have managed to pull off two full paragraphs of the next scene of my ongoing novel, which is quite a lot considering how much returning to work has disturbed me.

On the first day back, about twenty minutes from the end of the working day, I received a call. That late, we usually don’t pick up, and I seriously considered just pretending I had already left, but the call came from HQ. They told me that some technician from the electromedical service was in need of a computer technician because the monitors that handle the delivery rooms in the maternity ward weren’t “receiving data.” That’s too convoluted of an issue to start investigating so late in the evening. I considered just creating a ticket and leaving a note for my boss to decide next morning what to do; I certainly wasn’t going to interview the technician from the electromedical service so that he would rope me in past my schedule; they don’t pay me overtime. However, I ended up contacting the engineer on call.

I had tried to forget about that incident, but the following day, that engineer approached me and told me that she had been dealing with the issue from 22:00 to 1:30. Turns out that the monitors weren’t “receiving data” because none of them would turn on. It was an electrical issue. The technicians on duty from the electromedical service seemed to be newbies, and they insisted that we were responsible because a switch (related to the computer network) was nearby, but that apparently was also dead because it wasn’t receiving power. Basically, it was the same situation as complaining to your internet provider that you can’t browse the internet, even though your computer doesn’t even turn on. Eventually the engineer managed to convince an electrician to go and deal with the situation; it was their responsibility, after all.

The supervisor of the maternity ward was fuming for hours, fearing that any of the newborns may die, and had to call in additional nurses. If I hadn’t taken that goddamn call, nor called the engineer on duty, my ass may have been toast. On my first day back.

Have I stated enough times that I hate this job? I’m autistic, for fuck’s sake. What the hell am I doing dealing with constant chaos, an open plan office in which half of the people act like they’re in high school or middle school, and with such a lack of training and documentation that you must pursue other technicians around to figure out how to solve plenty of tasks? My only hope in this organization is that I may receive a call to work at a smaller hospital, and get stuck working there with an indefinite contract that would allow me to pay my bills reliably. I’m too old and generally uninterested to get back into programming, because I’d have to learn lots of shit I don’t care about (such as programming for mobile phones and websites).

This segues awkwardly into the following: a few days ago I had a conversation with an autistic gal from the US I’ve been talking to online for a while. Not sure how it came up, but I told her that when I was a kid I felt compelled to drown in cold water (not a particularly odd subject among the ones we bring up). She was stunned, because she felt the same way back then, specifically in cold water. She suggested that in a previous life we may have drowned in the Atlantic. I proposed that we may have been citizens of Atlantis. In any case, I have always felt like there was something waiting for me in the cold, black depths of bodies of water. Perhaps a kind of home.

In my beloved previous novel, My Own Desert Places, my protagonist, Irene, killed herself by jumping off a cliff, intending to crush her skull against the rocks below. Instead of that, she became crippled, and lay there until the tide drowned her. This isn’t much of a spoiler, because she starts that novel as a ghost. That was somewhat autobiographical. Back when I was twenty-one or twenty-two, I had such a harrowing experience at my first paid job, that one morning I couldn’t muster the strength to get on the bus and face my bastardly bosses and the tasks that I wasn’t trained properly to fulfill. I had survived until then by luck; middle school was bad, but I spent most of my high school years in a psychotic state. I skipped most classes to wander around town, sneaking into random apartment buildings and spending hours in the stark darkness between flights of stairs, listening to the echoes. A few of those times, I prayed for real (never again afterwards): I asked whatever omnipotent creature may exist in the vast darkness of the universe to come down and kill me. She never came. That indifferent bitch keeps herself busy somewhere out there, spinning her web.

That day, when I refused to take the bus to work, I had a realization: my life until then had sucked major ass. My longest relationship had ended with her gaslighting me about a guy who “was like a little brother” to her. She cheated with him and left. I remember vividly the humiliation I tolerated afterwards; I had no self-esteem left, so I took her calls. The whole thing was a terrible mistake; I shouldn’t have met her to begin with. I hadn’t healed from that pain, and my first job suggested that the rest of my adult life would be strewn with even worse nightmares.

I had enough. At that point I intended to head to some cliff and throw myself off. Plenty of such spaces around. In my mind, I signed off on everything. But because I’m a coward, instead of that I went to the library, and as a result I’m writing these words. I must say, though, that earlier this afternoon, as I was violently expelling diarrhea in the bathroom because my IBS wanted to ruin my day even more than usual, I lamented, as I have done often, that I didn’t kill myself any of the many, many times that I have wanted to. Hell, even as a kid I remember clearly walking alone in the rain, under an umbrella, and wondering why did I have to be born and tolerate this cold, this grating world, and the constant pain.

Anyway, plenty of my stories have involved cold water. Diving into cold water and coming across a downed UFO. Being dragged into the cold depths by a sort of siren (in a novella I wrote in Spanish). Having to rescue your suicidal wife from the cold water because she doesn’t want to live in your manufactured paradise (in another novella I wrote in Spanish). Pretty sure there have been quite a few others. I also wish I could run some LiDAR on the continental shelves that went underwater at the end of the last ice age, when the sea level rose about 120 meters (400 feet). Atlantis went to shit when the North American tectonic plate got subducted and locked like a thousand meters underwater, submerging the Azores plateau, due to the catastrophic melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Or at least, that’s what I prefer to think.

Not sure why I felt like sharing these thoughts. Maybe because I wanted to give myself a break from studying, and I needed to get some stuff off my chest. Until next time, stranger who is reading this for reasons that would likely annoy me if I ever found out about them.