No suckcess with Access

Yesterday was pay day. I checked my account last night, and amazingly, the money is still going in. I'm not earning that much, but relative to what I actually achieve at work, I'm doing very nicely indeed.

My job at times drives me insane. I'm always having to follow some process or other. Today it was an 18-step procedure (each step was numbered) that involved pressing buttons in Access, the idea being that if you press the right buttons in the right order, the program should spit out something meaningful. However I failed to get anything meaningful to spit out and eventually I gave up. Eighteen is just too many things to go wrong I guess. It's also the number of years of education I had, and at times I wonder what the point of it all was. I had Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" in my head today, probably because of the line "twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift".

Last year we had this survey that tried, by a series of questions, to categorise us by our personalities and our work habits. My results were interesting. Four per cent of Australasians who completed the survey were more introverted than me. No surprises there. In fact I'm surprised it was that high. Just 9% worked in a more flexible, as opposed to a structured, manner than me. Again, I'm hopelessly unstructured and disorganised, so that was to be expected. The one that got me, however, was that only 16% of Australasians were less creative than me. But now I see it: the more I've been pushing buttons and following procedures, the more my creativity has been sapped from me.

I'm feeling better than I was the last time I blogged. Don't know why that is. Things seem to go in cycles. Getting exercise, eating well, sleeping well, not drinking, all those things help. Last night's "boot camp" tennis session, which basically involves hitting lots of balls and running around, but crucially no scoring, must have done me some good.

And maybe I'm feeling better because I'm not living in Victoria right now. The bushfires that have raged across that Australian state have now claimed at least 173 lives, possibly as many as 300. I can't even begin to imagine what some of these people must be going through, and the thought that some of the fires might have been lit deliberately is sickening.