Work

What to Expect the First Year is one of the most helpful baby guides. After my friend's giving birth last month, I tried to buy one, but no dice, until I found the third edition on the last day of my New Zealand trip.

I knew I couldn't tell the difference between the second and third editions. I picked up the six-hundred-something-page book, rummaging through the chapters, and reminded myself the days when my daughter didn't sleep through the night. The sleep cycle consists of wake, calm the baby, doze, wake, calm the baby, try a bottle of milk, rinse, wake, another bottle, rinse. Repeat. To get an idea of what this cycle looks like, you may go and ask any bleary-eyed medical intern how a pager behaves like a baby. Wake, tame the pager, doze, wake, calm the patient, try a cup of coffee, another pager alarm, wake, another cup of coffee. Repeat. All parents and new doctors go through this sort of chaotic sleep-wake cycle.

I'm not an expert on parenting, but I've been calling myself a master of pager. During these years of hospital work, I might not be the first to arrive or the last to leave my hospital, but I have a work ethic of keeping the pager with me all the time. Seven days a week. Just imagine a clingy child who wraps his legs around his parent's as tight as a gecko, and you'll know how my pager sticks with me. That said, a pager doesn't work when the owner travels out of town. It's the only time when I don't bring my pager with me. That means a holiday for my pager. A word of caution: holiday doesn't apply to an e-mail box. Well, I used to let it be. Sometimes I came back from holiday to find a flooding mailbox. And by "sometimes" I mean "almost every time." By "flooding" I mean "quota exceeded." Truth be told, such scene change from vacation to a morning swamped with work plus mails-to-be replied makes you go bonkers. Yes, you clinically go mad. I tried this myself. More than once.

This year, I found a simple solution: Make peace with my hospital mailbox and configure my personal smartphone to read the mails. That means 24/7 fingertip access to my workplace mails. I know what you're thinking, but checking the e-mails to leave my in-basket empty (even during my vacation) is obviously more effective than getting mad. That's the philosophy of Pike Place Fish market: There is always a choice about the way you do your work, even if there is not a choice about the work itself.