Looking For My Escape Route

I should have known that everything was too good to be true. My job as Work Center Coordinator was no where near as stressful as was my job as a Technical Trainer. The person I reported to was helpful, not a useless twit. There was the opportunity to work from home via secure remote access which I had already set up. I was finally getting into my groove. And yet, I should have realized that it all would get trashed, given my employer's past history.

No, I'm still employed by them. And still making the same money. But now instead of scheduling on site visits for servers, plotters, printers and computer systems, I'm imaging and deploying computers for Capital Health.

One could say that there would be less stress involved in sitting on your ass and imaging a computer (a job that takes about an hour), then wheeling it on a cart to someone's office and installing it than it would be trying to meet SLA's and organize the day of 10 people. And yeah, normally you'd be right. But the downside of this whole thing is that I'm now working out of RAH. The hospital I spent 3 of the worst weeks of my life at.

You know what? I thought I could turn it off. And it worked in some instances. I shut my brain off when I walked past the spot I parked in most of the time when I went to visit Menerva Jr. Turned it off again as I got into the glass elevators in the Active Treatement Center. Did it again when walking through the Woman's Center pedway between two buildings.

I'm shadowing one of your typical young geek males. Bad hair, can't dress himself, has the social capabilities of a doorknob. His only redeeming quality (and that's only cause I'm a geek myself) is that his cell's ring tone is the Doctor Who theme song. But still, Monday was my first day. (I took today off because of doctor's appointments, and am glad for it.) And so, being egar to figure things out (and getting thoroughally pissed off at the inability of this geek to train anyone, however biased my ex-trainer self is), I didn't pay attention to a key set of words when he asked if I wanted to tag along for a system deploy at the Bear Lounge. I said sure, and followed along.

The Information Systems department is located at one end of the properity. And where we had to go was all the way at the other end, in the Active Treatment Center. And as we walked there, in my head all I was thinking was "don't go to that building, don't go to that building." And then, "shit, we're in that building." Get in the glass elevators. "Don't get off on the 5th floor, don't go to the 5th floor."

"Shit. Alright then, go straight, gooooooo straight."

"Shit!"

5th floor of the Active Treatment Center is the Neonatial Intensive Care Unit, among other units, but takes up the grand majority of the floor space. And then it hit me. Bear Lounge... One of the radio stations out here, The Bear, has sponsored a family room just outside of the NICU. I spent a lot of time in that room...

So when the guy I was shadowing pondered aloud where was this place, I pointed over my shoulder to the room beside the vending machine. Inside we went, and I couldn't hold it. And it didn't help that inside that room, I met up with a girl I knew from Dell, who was there because she had just given birth to her son that Saturday at 30 weeks. The tears came... I managed to stop them in a few moments, but the seal was broken.

When I got home, the first thing I did was go up to bed, curl up, and bawled. So I can't turn it off... I was naive to think I could. And while I could probably desensitize myself to the surroundings, I don't know if I really want to deal with this right now. Being pregnant as is is bringing enough painful memories of losing Menerva Jr, like I need to be reminded of it further.