Another day off, another cutscene

Today I managed to finish the lineart of this short cutscene. He's grabbing the cellphone of that passed-out woman to see who is calling.

Now, some rantings about my short-term contract at the hospital.

I completed my first 30 days working there already. Last Friday (19), one of our coworkers from the first floor had a crying crisis because she couldn't keep up with the routine of the ambulatories, so they chose me to replace her there to prevent another sick leave. Yes, of course. Let's toss the rookie into the volcano without any heads up and hope for the best.

I started there on Monday, and in less than 40 minutes, I understood why she was crying. Instead of 17 psychiatric patients to take care of, it's 63 drug addiction patients. They are all scattered through four different zones on the first floor, and none of them have any form of identification, so you can't tell these patients from visitors just by looking. They don't use wristbands or hospital clothing because they all go home at the end of the day. Now, my job is to find these 63 patients in the crowd and discretely take them to a "hidden" place to drug test them. The therapists need these patients tested before their assessments, but at the same time, they don't care to give any help to identify them, so it's all up to me.

The next day, I spent almost five hours extracting one month of the ambulatory raw data of these four zones (day by day, on the slowest PC of all) and tossed everything into a giant spreadsheet. On Wednesday, I spent every free minute available on the job building an Excel tool to crunch some data and track these patients based on their routines from the last 30 days. It still needs some adjustments and to cover some corner cases, but it's working very well. It reduced my workload drastically because now I know with some precision WHEN and WHERE they are roaming in these zones, so I can grab many of them at one go and conduct the drug testings efficiently. I kept using this tool on Thursday, and it worked wonderfully well. I was even pinpointing the patients that ran away from testing on purpose and informed their therapists!

On Friday, I showed these achievements to my boss, and instead of praising me, she voiced some concerns about using 'sensible data' from the database to build such a 'non-standard' tool on Excel. It felt like throwing cold water on my efforts to survive the ambulatory while being efficient and working smart. Now I understand a bit of why people are losing their minds and getting sick leave while working there. The only thing that kept me calm and rational during that conversation was the thought of the four generous paychecks I have yet to receive from all this stress.

Well, she can go to hell. I will make my life easier there the way I can and keep using my spreadsheet, whether they like it or not. Three more months, and I'm out of there.