Sticky dates

Centrelink, from whom all benefits do flow, is ever so slightly frustrating because their payment timetable does not accord with my Smaller Half's pay week.  This means that I need to analyse her paysheets and divvy them up into the overlapping fortnights into which Centrelink carves up time.

A similar situation exists in the unit that I'm with at the moment at the hospital.  Rather than having a weekly schedule so that I can turn up to the operating theatre and say, "If it's Wednesday you must be Mr Farkas", they have a four-weekly schedule.  So there are meetings that happen on Wednesday of Week 2, or Friday of Week 4.

Although this complicates my life slightly, I can cope with it.  It gets annoying though because there are other meetings/events that happen on the third Thursday of the calendar month, for example.  So there are clashes with the four-weekly timetable which means that things are Never As They Seem.

Again, this is something that a somewhat intelligent and sophisticated person such as myself should be able to deal with.  Unfortunately the Big Boss Surgeon is quite old and grew up in Tsarist Russia and still denounces the Gregorian calendar as a communist conspiracy.  As a result, whenever he's around we all have to pretend that it's thirteen days in the future.  This meant that not only did I have to come in on a Sunday, I also missed out on my birthday.

I got so fed up with this that last week I didn't bother to go in at all.  When I turned up this week I was going to tell them that I'd been at home preparing for the Mayan apocalypse, but since I'd been using a reconstruction of Antikythera Mechanism to calibrate my diary I'd erroneously thought that it was going to happen on November 3 2011 rather than December 21 2012.  Unfortunately I'd forgotten that it was Daylight Saving so I was an hour late and they'd already finished the ward round and gone off for coffee so I missed them entirely.