MIQ Musings – Day 5

MIQ Diary – Day 5 – Better shun the bait, than struggle in the snare.

Another early start. 445am and I was wide awake. There are signs of improvement, however. It’s not like my time zone-itis will be cured overnight, but instead slowly & incrementally over many nights.

I fiddled about with some work things & soon it was 830am & health check time! Today I received my Day 3 test result…negative. No Chupa Chup ☹

The MinHealth staff are great – very friendly & professional. I suppose being friendly is part of the job, although I don’t think you can really fake it. Good on them all for making the stay as pleasant as possible. I know I am singling them out from a wider team of very good people, but they are the ones I have daily contact with. The kudos handed to everyone else here goes without saying. There, I said it.

The Waikato District Health Board ransomware hack a while back has put a serious dent in some of their technology and it has had a real impact on them being able to do their jobs. I now experience it first hand as the MinHealth person struggles to read their own handwriting on a scrap of paper. It’s not hard to see how such a thing could cost lives in a different situation. Hackers are assholes – but the Waikato DHB leadership who created the conditions to allow the hack to happen – I have special, unpublishable words for them.

Anyway, back to my room for meetings & musings.

The people who tested positive with COVID on Day 3 were shipped off to quarantine late in the afternoon. During the time they were moved, we weren’t allowed out of our rooms & once they had departed all the common areas were deep cleaned. A siren was activated to indicate when it we were allowed out of our rooms again. Sometimes this feels like a bad movie. Anyway I wish The Infecteds well, and hope they have a full recovery.

All in all it was one of those days that slipped by with few remarkable occurrences. The interruptions have become routine now, and work has been a saviour thus far – I have been avoiding alcohol as it’s a very easy fix for the kind of boredom that affects my brain, & I don’t particularly want to fall off the wagon for something so trivial as having a quiet day.

There is a limit of one bottle of wine, or six bottles of beer, per person per day. That’s a couple of hours’ entertainment for me. I am sure I will take the wine list up on its kind offer at some point, but in the meantime my avoidance tactics involve going to bed early – which is, in part, why I am waking up so early. It’s a price worth paying, I think.