Some days I just feel so loved. Other days, it's just plain the opposite--like today. I arrived at work this morning on time and the third shifter was just loitering around the blood bank. I was waiting for her to pass on messages, but she said nothing to me. We exchanged a few glances and that was it. I stood there about 10 minutes waiting for her to say something to me. Then, finally my partner for today comes in. Right away, the third shifter goes and passes on messages and instructions to her. It was as if telling me anything wasn't worth the effort. Throughout the day, 90% of the calls I got today were for the one other person in the lab. And it wasn't just the same caller over and over again or all personal calls. They were all work-related. First it was the pathologist. She asked whom I was working with and decided my coworker--a person with zero information about the particular case in question--would be a better person to speak to. Anybody but me, it seemed. Then it was the technical specialists, all asking for my partner. Even other techs wanted only to speak to her and not me. The worst part? These were all mostly questions I could have answered. On days like these, I feel completely worthless as a professional technologist.

And now for a digression. Today when I was doing my email, I used both words "futz" and "muck" in the same message. I don't think it's dawned on me that they both can be euphemistic alternatives to a certain swear word. Yes, they do have different etymological backgrounds (one Yiddish and the other Old Norse while the cussword comes to use from Dutch) and don't connote involvement of the same body parts as the expletive, but with some creative blending of the two, there's reason to believe that they can be used interchangeably. Perhaps it was coincidental that I made this discovery--given my mood up to that point in the day, probably not. I guess this thought might have been relevant after all.