Listening to: Steamboy OST - Steve Jablonsky

So anyway I got a job, and have been working in a hospital for the past 1.5 months or so.

It's considered normal for anyone to ask how's work - I ask people how's their work, common courtesy and niceties and conversation-starters and all that. The problem is these days when anyone asks me how's work, I shrug and say the same thing:


If you're wondering, no, it's not a good thing.

See, people *want* to talk about work - they like to talk about how their day went, good or otherwise. They want to tell people about the funny stuff or about the sucky colleague who keeps pinching your paperclips. They want to talk about the people they meet, the things they do, the oddities they see.

I don't.

Save for my parents and Doris, I don't even talk about working life anymore after the first week of work. In my parents' case, I keep it brief because I don't want them telling me to "grow a spine" again after I was a nervous wreck of insecurities three weeks before work started and made a mistake of telling them about it.

One day after several "S'ok"s, Kelly caught me online and asked, "So, truthfully, how is work?"

I said, "S'ok".

Why is it so hard for me to tell people anything more?

One would be how far my world has drifted from everyone else. They're all at the last chapter of Odin Sphere, I'm struggling to finish Gwendolyn's story because work requires me to have at least 6.5 hours of sleep and I'd rather spend my nights checking net stuff and making pointless ranty blog posts like this. Same thing with work - how many people can I talk to about erythrocyte sedimentation rates and not have to explain the whole damn process and finer points before getting to the punchline, and by then everyone's forgotten the whole joke? Cranky doctors not getting their parking lot because orientation is having a training session there?

How many people would understand the insecurities of being expected to know how to stain bone marrow aspirates despite only having three weeks of haematology in uni? The frustration of staring at results desperately trying to interpret the finer points of high/low platelet counts and the correlation to Large Unidentified Cells? The pressure of having to pick up the standard procedure of each bench in a month when the only colleagues who can help are unhelpful? When Doris came back for two weeks, I spent a day just pouring 1 months' worth of ranting to her because I didn't have to explain much. We'd just compare notes on procedures, and the joke would continue.

Secondly is my fault of being deluded long enough to think this was what I've always wanted.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy lab work (hell I enjoy hospitals) - but I don't feel *happy*. I don't wake up every day going "oh boy today is going to be fun!" because colleagues are MUCH nicer to students on attachment in a day more than they'll ever be to me. I spend weekends in cinemas at climactic battles with a sinking feeling knowing that the movie will end and I will have to wake up for work the next day. If not for being buried in work 8 hours a day, I'd spend every other hour staring at the other hospital I turned down and wonder what would my life be if I'd picked them instead, or what if I bit the bullet, went for a writers' course and tried to jam my foot in the literary world (like what everyone thinks I SHOULD have done seven years ago). People who work 5 days a week going "oh noes tomorrow's monday" get no sympathy from me because I work Saturdays, a half-day where I work more than the entire week.

The first person I ranted to replied:

"Aiyah, working life is like that lah, isn't this what you wanted?"

Years of working to that goal, and now I'm not so sure.

Which comes to the third reason I don't talk about work:

I don't want to hear, "grow a goddamn spine" every time I open my mouth.

I hate whingers. We all hate whingers. We tell whingers to sit down shut up and take it like a man instead of sounding like an emo loser.

The first time I was genuinely frightened about this, my dad told me to stop whinging. Mum told me to stop whinging. People I thought I could talk to told me to stop whinging.

If there's nothing lovely to say, best to say nothing right?

When people read this, they'll pat me and say it's ok we understand. They don't. They *won't*. These are people who told me after my first week that I'll be OK and I'll enjoy it and I'll learn fast; they've also thrown away all knowledge of lab work never to use it again, or never spilled a tube of blood on their hands and smeared blood on all and sundry trying to clean up the mess. If an engineer or a computer programmer came and told me all their woes and insecurities, I wouldn't get their situation either - and I'm honest about it. Don't say you can "try" to understand because "trying" to understand requires 2 years and several thick textbooks, something I haven't done well either.

In the end it's easier to say "S'ok" and hope that people get sick of my answer soon enough to realise it's pointless to ask when they've already got a stock answer printed in their head. You want to hear the good things? Well here you go, I'm sorry it's such a boring answer, but that's my job in a nutshell.

In one emo conclusion: Nobody understands.

There I said it. Now go buy lottery tickets.