Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I had practically nothing to do at work all week, so this morning when I had the last of my three healthcare appointments this week, something with an artificial sense of urgency turned up.

At our standup-type meeting, my manager said something like "This isn't an end-of-day thing, this is like a by-2pm thing. Can you spend the next hour working on X?" and I was like "I'm really sorry, I can't, I have to leave for a hospital appointment in like three minutes" (I had reminded him of this last thing yesterday, he just forgot which is fair enough considering what a pressure cooker of stress he's been in too). I wasn't expecting to get back before noon (because I'm very pessimistic about how long you have to wait for x-rays, and I was pretty accurate today).

So I was frantically trying to type on my phone and connect to the wi-fi in the x-ray waiting room, and in the process doing nothing of any value but instead accidentally stripping the formatting of an important document, being unable to copy text from a work document I wrote to a work email I was trying to write, because of """security""", and generally being very stressed while able to do very little because I needed stuff from my work laptop...

It worked out okay. I got discharged from the fracture clinic as expected (since this appointment was supposed to be six weeks ago, but it's still nice the x-rays looked fine) and I did the work thing by 1pm that my manager had asked if I could do in an hour.

I was exhausted. I finally thought to have lunch. It helped a little but really I needed a nap. (I'd considered it a real achievement that I'd slept until 5:30 this morning! but that's apparently still not a lot of sleep.)

At 1:59, I thought my 2pm meeting had been canceled by an e-mail update at 1:57. This would have been great because diffrentcolours and mother_bones had left for their weekend away at 1:58. Gary started whining at me two minutes later. So it would've been really convenient if my 2 o'clock meeting had indeed been canceled, but soon I realized it had just been Teams being weird and the meeting was back on my calendar (if shorter; half an hour instead of an hour). I very seriously considered pretending that I hadn't noticed the meeting re-appear, but it turns out that it's good I did since it reminded me that an in-person outreach thing I'd vaguely agreed to do is on Monday and not, like I had vaguely thought, a long time from now. I blame not getting the e-mail invite; if it's not in my work calendar I know I have no chance. (It is in my work calendar now.)

Welcome to the weekend!