Pseudosaviour

17 January - Got woken up at the ungodly hour of 745 by a phone call from the Worker's Compensation Board. The woman was very aggressive and almost a bit accusatory in her tone to me but maybe it was because I was still a bit groggy and last night's dosage of pseudoephadrine had worn off and my head was glugged up with mucus. Went over the facts of the case for the umpteenth time (i don't like using the term umpteenth but I can't for the life of me remember how many times i've had to recall the details of that day - it's been a lot). After about 25m we were done and I was just trying to zone out again when the girl called me back to go over the crucial detail of how to spell my name. Ooh, that's a very interesting name, where does it come from? Standard story is surname - Hungarian via Slovakia; first name Hippy. I can just imagine the perception that all the people have of Mr and Mrs Cucvara from Australia - why would they name their son Saxifrage, the father must be a pot smoking doofus with tie-dyed shirts and the mother is a kaftan wearing flower child. Well, they'll never know my secret ... Popped an Advil cold and flu tablet with the active ingredient being my favourite drug, pseudoephadrine. For years whenever I had a cold I would always tough it out with the occasional echinacea pill and maybe i'd just load up on Vitamin (pronounced like vita-wheat) C and it would take a few days to a few weeks to recover. Last year I thought i'd try out some generic cold and flu stuff and I couldn't believe how quickly it all dried up. Pseudoephadrine is fantastic! It's got me thinking as to what normal ephadrine is like? It's still annoying having a cold, probably caught off my housemate, mark (you should be thanking me for giving it to you!! Why on earth would I ever want to have a cold???) but at least it's at a time when i'm already out of action.
Although, I did get buzzed at around 9 by BJ, my manager, with a sad sack story of woe of how a bunch of bikers couldn't be found and begging me to come in for a few hours. I still can't ride the bike but I agreed to do a bit on foot for a while and it was nice to be doing something for a while. However, being a foot courier is a far cry from the freedom of being on a bike. It takes so long to get between buildings and you still get just as wet. We also have a new dispatcher who started today, Lee, who i've apparently met before but I can't for the life of me remember who he is. He seems very nice, which is more than can be said for Chris, who was fired specifically for NOT being nice. I was only out there for a couple of hours and my hand ached a little but it seemed like the cold (the disease i'm carrying within my gene's survival machine and not the temperature, although that wasn't spectacular either) was what really caused the most amount of bother. Headed home and tried to pass out unsuccessfully but did manage to get through Richard Dawkin's River Out of Eden. A continuation of the Selfish Gene and the blind watchmaker, it's very good and full of little statistical experiments which prove evolution but this one contained a true legend of genetics which was one of the most beautiful scientific theories that i've ever read. I've heard about it before but have never really considered the implications of it - Mitochondrial Eve, a real woman who existed about 150,000 years ago (probably in Africa but potentially in Asia) who the entire population of the world is actually descended from. She was not the first woman by any means and she had thousands or probably millions of contemporaries who are also the ancestors of some of us but every human being in the world today counts her as one of our ancestors. That she existed at all is obvious but how the scientists calculated where and when she lived is amazing - I won't spoil it. There's also Y-Chromosone Adam who we also all share as a great (insert many more greats here) grandfather who probably lived 60,000 years ago and his story is also interesting but it doesn't have the beauty of us all coming out of the same womb ... What's also interesting is how some creationists have seized on the idea as proof of their theory even though the theory that proves mitochondrial Eve's existence completely blows creationism out of the water.