The Finite

Okay, the theme of the last week: the future.

It all starts at 9:30 on Wednesday, when I leave the hospital early to make the 110 mile drive from Fort Wayne to West Lafayette. My car is outfitted with all the trimmings to bling it out as my bedroom on wheels (in that it’s full of piles of clothes and no one goes in it but me.) The unfinished business I have back at Purdue? Breakfast burrito from Oasis, then, the annual pharmacy career fair.

The importance (enough for me to drive all that way) came down to a few key factors: bacon, pesto and scrambled eggs. When you put that all together in a toasted tortilla, it just really works. You get the crunch of the bacon, the soft fluffiness of the eggs, and the pesto’s nutty smoothness underlining the meat.

After that came the career fair, which meant getting suited up, and pulling on my hit list of companies to explore face-to-face after having stalked them online. I see some familiar faces, nab a couple dozen business cards and make sure to grab some paracord lanyards before the Navy health recruiter returns from lunch.

Had some time to kill afterwards so went to work on my rotation projects in a computer lab. I was “that guy” in the suit staring at the same Word document for 40 minutes.

Torturous.

Even more so as I have to worry about my suit staying clean. One of the booths I visited has asked if I was interested in an interview the following day. And of course, I can’t not be. So I went and stalked this place up online and then I went in there the next afternoon and babbled. Actually, I was early so they let me in ten minutes early. And kept me five minutes after. It was super awkward. But first dates always are, right?

So yeah. I talked about computer stuff, I wandered off topic, I made pop culture references. All in all, it was a pretty fair representation of what being around me is really like. You know, minus the lack of unrequited sexual tension.
If they wanted to know what they would get if they hired me, they got a representative sample.

So tired. The 11-hour days don’t help, but the main problem is the asthma at night and the allergies in the day. I must be sensitive to pretty much everything here in Fort Wayne. Harvest dust or cul de sacs or WASPs or something.

The plus side is that I’m only 3 miles away from the hospital. So it’s only a six-minute drive. (It’s not like walking is an option. There aren’t any sidewalks for a great deal of the way.) And the place is pretty legit, too. Like they gave me a badge reel.

The last hospital I was at didn’t. All they gave me was a little alligator clip that I put on my white coat’s right pocket so I don’t accidentally knock it off like I do when it’s on my lapel. One time I was carrying a two coffees into the pharmacy and had my hands full, but I need to pass my badge near the RF reader on the wall to unlock the door. I was just too short to bump up against it so I had to do little hops and hip thrusts to try to get my hip up nearer to the reader. A technician chose just that moment to open the door from the inside, as I had my leg up on the wall, sort of straddling and dry humping the door jamb.

So that’s why I need a badge reel.