Tech support

The wet room, July 2020

One of the things that I thought I would do more of when I reduced my Diabetes working hours was volunteering, alongside all the volunteer work involved in the LTRP and the Buddhist group. And it remained no more than a thought until last week, when I supported Lola II and her co-trainer as they delivered their Community Mediation Skills course.

Lola II puts a lot of work into these courses, and I'd heard a lot about them over the years, so I had suggested that I could help a while ago. I imagined running around getting people drinks, moving them between rooms, ordering lunches, that sort of thing. What with one thing and another it turned into quite a different role, which was mainly tech support. And a bit of making drinks and getting lunch, but only for the three of us.

The challenges began for Lola II before the course started, not counting all the work she put into the migration from a face-to-face to an online course. The main reason she had chosen to deliver from a venue rather than from home was to make sure that the WiFi was reliable - there's nothing worse than dropping out in the middle of assessing someone's mediation for a qualification. A few days before the course was due to start the venue got in touch to say that their WiFi had been hacked and had therefore been taken down completely, but they had some sort of solution that involved dongles. They tried it out, and thought that it would work.

It very nearly did work except for some difficulty with passwords, but thankfully all was in place at the point where it was needed. The first three days of the course ran last week, and I got a lot of practice in some of the more arcane aspects of the Zoom program - while I'm familiar with the basics of Interactive White Boards and Breakout Rooms, I found out some of the more advanced features by means of ticking various checkboxes and seeing if it worked.

We were just starting to relax into Day 1, with technology that seemed to be working for the participants and for us, when the fire alarm went off. Thankfully it was a test and it stopped quite quickly, but that was certainly something I hadn't anticipated. By the end of Day 3 all was running smoothly, and the best part was that the participants seemed to be fully engaged and enjoying themselves. I'd learned a bit about mediation as well. 

October 2020

Then the second lockdown happened. Thankfully, the team at the venue are still prepared for us to continue with the second three days of the course, and I'm hoping it will go even more smoothly. There will be a fourth person in the room which may create a problem of noise leakage from one computer to another, but we've been promised screens and we'll have to hope that it works.

My abiding memory is sitting with Lola II and her co-trainer in the room with each of them talking to participants in a separate online Breakout Room, and feeling like I was in the Matrix - I could unplug either of them and they would fall limply to the floor.

Flfs 3 and 4

Lots of other things have also happened, including Flfs 3 and 4 coming to tile the wet room at long last. It looks great. Despite having known about my availability for months, Flf 1 is unable to come back and finish the job this week and I am back with Lola II next week. I am not happy with the delay, but it will make it all the better when I can finally stand up to shower.

At work I acquired a telephone headset and also a telephone compatible with it, which has made my telephone clinics much more comfortable. We have continued to collaborate on the Diabetes Structured Education courses intended for delivery within our NHS Trust and also the adjacent one, and it has become clear that an online option has to be created since this Covid thing isn't going away any time soon. I'm very glad to say that I'm not involved in the education side of the diabetes service any more but I have to remain on call in case of non-availability of other members of staff, so I will have to find out more about all this.

And I attended some online training in the use of the Libre Flash Glucose Monitoring System which was arranged so long ago that it has had to be postponed twice. It was finally delivered via Zoom, and was surprisingly good - I learned quite a lot about the Ambulatory Glucose Profile, which is a longwinded and misleading name for a diagram that shows glucose results for the last two weeks in an easily interpreted graphical format that has been standardised between all the different devices on offer. I might write more about this if I have the strength, but I've had just one day off in the last nine days so I might save that for another time.

November 2020