I vomited at work today. Twice. Consequently, my gracious supervisor granted me half a day's unpaid leave, and I have been squandering said leave for four and a half glorious hours.
I suppose I should take a little bit of time to explain what I do so that you will know what exactly I am getting a break from. I am part of a company that does Service Operations Outsourcing in the insurance and financial industries. In simpler terms, that means I work at a service center that takes phone calls and processes customer requests. Mostly, I throw energy and patience at problems that are ultimately the fault of our monstrously inadequate computer systems. For instance, when we mistakenly draft someone's bank account for four times the actual premium, I get to clean up the mess. It's delightful work.
I have been struck of late by the importance of simplicity. I have also been struck by my seeming inability to do anything simply. For instance, at work, when I could be doing the bare minimum and sending the necessary form letters without considering my audience, I often let empathy prevent me from doing so. They hired me to be part of a machine, not an emotionally complicated person.
I suspect that my sickness today may have had as much to do with momentary dis-ease at work as it did with any disease. I must become better at detaching, or there might be more of these unfortunate experiences in the future.
As another result of my sick day, I have decided to delete a couple of other, smaller blogs that never get updated anymore. I figure that if I can't update one, I certainly can't update three. And the Internet needs less information on it, anyway. I also made a couple of changes to this blog -- hopefully, ones that are indicative of where it will go in the future. I am becoming increasingly interested in what it means to be part of a large organization, and "Noises From the Machine" seems like an apt title for where I want to experiment in the coming months in this space.
Of course, it's possible that everything in this post is a mere product of delirium and that tomorrow I will regret the changes I have made and the posts I have deleted on my other blogs. But the wonderful thing about this medium is that I can make them again if I want, but better. :-)
Sleep for now...
