Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2011-07-18 01:14 am
azurelunatic) wrote2011-07-18 01:14 am
Entry tags:
(Old stuff: February 1-4) Interview, twitterings, job, mental health vaporware
Tuesday 2/1
Having a warm fuzzy bathrobe really does not get old. I did have some trouble locating my red interview sweater for the interview, and eventually went with something else. I did break a shoelace.
I showed up early and nervous. The interview went well.![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise was a reference (also Kat and Management from the Call Center Hell) and D was a totally excellent badass reference.
Wednesday 2/2
Twitter was talking about the stigma associated with mental illness. Some things, like my presumed-depression (wreaked hell on my life, never formally diagnosed, kept under control by St. John's Wort, assumption not challenged by my AZ general practitioner) are chronic and I can't assume that when they stop bothering me they're OMG CURED and I can stop treating it; if the St. John's Wort is not in my system, my ability to bounce back from routine mood-dips is impaired.
I got the call confirming the temp job, ending my way-too-long time out of work. So relieved. Then Tif and I went to a Silicon Valley Google Technology Users Group meetup for Google Refine. We've got a fairly large spam dataset...
Thursday 2/3
First day of the temp job. I had a hell of a time actually locating the building, as the buildings in question are part of an office complex where all the buildings are on the same large chunk of property, all of the buildings are sequentially numbered with street numbers that the property has a right to, but they are arranged in a ring that means that the street numbers have little to do with their actual orientation to the street.
The office was interesting, painted in bold colors (lots of lime green and white) and decorated with various Delightful Swag.
I came in just a bit early, and the receptionist had me wait. The guy overseeing my position ran past (literally ran), was hailed by the secretary, she explained that I was here, I think he jogged back to shake my hand, and then ran off again. She accepted this with a very this-is-all-part-of-a-normal-day sort of demeanor, so I got the idea that he did this a lot.
My cube was right by the small kitchen, making it very easy for me to get tea and coffee. Tea and coffee are good. They had a nice array of tea choices, which I found delightful compared to Arizona office tea, which is basically the cheap black tea. (There's a place in my cup for cheap black tea, and this is made 2:1 with strongly flavored orange tea, brewed too strong and too sweet, for use while writing.)
The commute was, of course, hell both ways. 101 is a pit during the 8-10 & 4-6 commute windows. Lucky me.
Friday 2/4
After work, I went to see my aunt. There was hilarity and also shortbread. She took frozen butter and used her handy-dandy crank-driven rotary shredder to cut it into tidy little bits, making the shortbread process amazingly fast. Tasty shortbread, too.
I speculated on Twitter about a vaporware-y technique in mental health care, which assumes enough resources (monetary and available people) to carry it out: first one gets set up/what-have-you, which would be voluntary. Then for people who know about themselves that they are not currently in need of serious care, but have the potential to drop into that state very suddenly, and not have, or not trust themselves to have, the ability to take the right moves to call for help when they need it (or not recognize when they are in the mental state that it's one that should be looked at) -- these people would be set up with a semi-automatic communications system where they take action to regularly send along the information that yes, they're ok, they're doing fine, they don't actually need help. Checkins might take the form of visiting a website and pressing a button while logged in, sending an email, sending a text, and each checkin might be good for say 25 hours. It would also be flexible enough to account for vacations in which one is out of ambit, and late nights out, and the like. Missing a scheduled checkin wouldn't immediately get police to the door, but would at least prompt a reminder (going from least-intrusive to more-intrusive), and one could also send a panic-button signal through any of the methods. (Though texts and emails are not reliable ways to get a panic button signal through in a timely fashion, and websites are only as good as the weakest component. A person in my extended social network might be alive today if her final email had come through in a timely fashion.) But someone in a crisis might find themselves more able to send a help-me text than make a 911 call. Sufficient missed check-ins would result in someone requesting a wellness check, or some such. I'm not sure if it could work better than some of the current systems out there, or whether there's something of the like already in place for some people.
Having a warm fuzzy bathrobe really does not get old. I did have some trouble locating my red interview sweater for the interview, and eventually went with something else. I did break a shoelace.
I showed up early and nervous. The interview went well.
denise was a reference (also Kat and Management from the Call Center Hell) and D was a totally excellent badass reference. Wednesday 2/2
Twitter was talking about the stigma associated with mental illness. Some things, like my presumed-depression (wreaked hell on my life, never formally diagnosed, kept under control by St. John's Wort, assumption not challenged by my AZ general practitioner) are chronic and I can't assume that when they stop bothering me they're OMG CURED and I can stop treating it; if the St. John's Wort is not in my system, my ability to bounce back from routine mood-dips is impaired.
I got the call confirming the temp job, ending my way-too-long time out of work. So relieved. Then Tif and I went to a Silicon Valley Google Technology Users Group meetup for Google Refine. We've got a fairly large spam dataset...
Thursday 2/3
First day of the temp job. I had a hell of a time actually locating the building, as the buildings in question are part of an office complex where all the buildings are on the same large chunk of property, all of the buildings are sequentially numbered with street numbers that the property has a right to, but they are arranged in a ring that means that the street numbers have little to do with their actual orientation to the street.
The office was interesting, painted in bold colors (lots of lime green and white) and decorated with various Delightful Swag.
I came in just a bit early, and the receptionist had me wait. The guy overseeing my position ran past (literally ran), was hailed by the secretary, she explained that I was here, I think he jogged back to shake my hand, and then ran off again. She accepted this with a very this-is-all-part-of-a-normal-day sort of demeanor, so I got the idea that he did this a lot.
My cube was right by the small kitchen, making it very easy for me to get tea and coffee. Tea and coffee are good. They had a nice array of tea choices, which I found delightful compared to Arizona office tea, which is basically the cheap black tea. (There's a place in my cup for cheap black tea, and this is made 2:1 with strongly flavored orange tea, brewed too strong and too sweet, for use while writing.)
The commute was, of course, hell both ways. 101 is a pit during the 8-10 & 4-6 commute windows. Lucky me.
Friday 2/4
After work, I went to see my aunt. There was hilarity and also shortbread. She took frozen butter and used her handy-dandy crank-driven rotary shredder to cut it into tidy little bits, making the shortbread process amazingly fast. Tasty shortbread, too.
I speculated on Twitter about a vaporware-y technique in mental health care, which assumes enough resources (monetary and available people) to carry it out: first one gets set up/what-have-you, which would be voluntary. Then for people who know about themselves that they are not currently in need of serious care, but have the potential to drop into that state very suddenly, and not have, or not trust themselves to have, the ability to take the right moves to call for help when they need it (or not recognize when they are in the mental state that it's one that should be looked at) -- these people would be set up with a semi-automatic communications system where they take action to regularly send along the information that yes, they're ok, they're doing fine, they don't actually need help. Checkins might take the form of visiting a website and pressing a button while logged in, sending an email, sending a text, and each checkin might be good for say 25 hours. It would also be flexible enough to account for vacations in which one is out of ambit, and late nights out, and the like. Missing a scheduled checkin wouldn't immediately get police to the door, but would at least prompt a reminder (going from least-intrusive to more-intrusive), and one could also send a panic-button signal through any of the methods. (Though texts and emails are not reliable ways to get a panic button signal through in a timely fashion, and websites are only as good as the weakest component. A person in my extended social network might be alive today if her final email had come through in a timely fashion.) But someone in a crisis might find themselves more able to send a help-me text than make a 911 call. Sufficient missed check-ins would result in someone requesting a wellness check, or some such. I'm not sure if it could work better than some of the current systems out there, or whether there's something of the like already in place for some people.
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A voluntary "if I don't check in by X time, send me a reminder; if I don't check in by Y time, worry my friends" service would be great. For acute things as well as chronic. Acute mental health issues like "I just had a major bad thing happen and am not sure how I'm going to cope over the next few days," safety issues like "I just had a fight with someone close to me and I don't *think* they've become dangerous and I don't want to badmouth them to others, but there is this very slight chance that I'm wrong and why take chances?". Health-related things like "I'm a hypochondriac; what if I pass out and don't wake up?" or like "There is a very small but real chance that I will become incapacitated and need medical care." Non-health-related things like "I'm sure this guy I'm meeting to buy an air conditioner off Craigslist is fine, but just in case, if I don't check back in two hours, send my friends his address."
(Doesn't some acute version exist for kink, actually? I think I remember hearing something about that...)
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