captlychee | Oct. 5th, 2017

So yesterday afernoon I got a little bit out of our much-vaunted but apparently immigration-sustained medical system and got the form to have a blood test. Apparently the pathology place won't give me the results of this blood test, and the doctor will contact me if there's a problem, so I have to go in some other time and plug up the appointment list just to get a copy of the results. This piece of info-hostaging, or whagever, is still around and really needs to be stamped out by changing the regs. I appreciate medical ~~oncifentility~~ confidentiality, but it should not be between doctor and patient, or between third party service provider and patient. Who's forking out the moolah for this crap, anyway?

Okay, the point is that I had to go in this morning to get the ol' sanguine humour siphoned from the system so they could do HBA1C, cholesterol, prostate, thyroid and some other crap which with any luck I'll be telling you avbout some time next week. I did my fastng, not having anything to eat or drink after midnight (in reality, after 4:30PM just for the hell of it) and trotted up the doctor's by 9:00AM. I waited around for a bit and then the nice lady with a somewhat Eastern European accent took my details and then some blood in a manner so astute and professional I didn't realise when she changed vials.

From there I went across Sturt St and had a traditional McDonald's breakfast—three hash browns, two sausage McMuffins^® and a large white full cream coffee (God, I hate how you have to specify all this crap with coffee, but the alternative at McDonalds would be tea and I just don't want to think about what they could do to a cup of tea). Then home.

As I was walking up the garden path to the front door, the phone dinged with an SMS. It turned out to be a missed call from Rob Hambrook, famed in song and story as…Rob Hambrook, who was in Ballarat and needed my address to complete his visit. In a matter of minutes he had driven around to my side of Lake Wendouree (ie, south) and came to the door. We exchanged a few anecdotes and had a couple of coffees, then I suggsted that since he had a car I could go up to Fantastic Furniture in Wendouree to get some (cheap) furniture, and then we could go down to Eastwood Plaza so he could pick up a new computer case.

"Would you like to put matching shoes on before we go?" he asked.
"What?" I said, looking down. "What the fuck?"

For, yes, Constant Reader, I had done all the walking around earlier on wearing a grey runer on the right foot and a black runer on the left foot.

This hasn't happened to me since 2001, when I was stressd out from work, Mum was running around like an idiot constatly interrupting with crap while I was trying to explain something to Kerryn and Mick and we went off to Pizza Hut or somewhere. Fortunately, then, I realised that I had mismatched shoes on before we went out and saw members of the general public. This time I was seen by the receptionist at the doctor's, the blood test lady, people at McDonalds…fucking everyone in Ballarat.

Now, there's that quote from Shawshank Redemption that says "How often do you really look at a man's shoes?" but fucking hell, somebody probably noticed. I'm already gearing up to a reputation of being some doddering recovering alcoholic or something whose eyesight has been rined by, I don't know, glue sniffing or someting, and now this! This!!

Thank God for Rob noticing, but why the fuck didn't He (ie, God) notify me in the first place that I had done this fuckwit thing? I seriously feel like not bothering to iron a shirt tomorrow. I mean, what is the point of being neat when the simplest attire duty completely eludes me? What the hell, mismatch everyithing! God knows what I'll look like on any surveillance footage I may one day appear on.