Six Degrees of Separation

"Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries." The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called Chains. It's amazing how often you meet people who are indeed connected to you by the most extraordinary of acquaintances!!! Today at church, met a lovely couple from Parkes who were in Sydney for the week and just visiting our church. Turned out that the lady I met was the music teacher of one of my med colleagues from Parkes! Perhaps not so surprising if one considers that in small country towns everybody kinda knows everybody, but nonetheless, it made me think that the six degrees of separation theory really might be true!

I remember once upon a time, one of the Sydney radio stations was playing a six degree of separation game show on the radio. What they did was to have the person calling up to play try and discover if they were connected by six degrees or less to some random name they pulled out of the phone directory. So I guess it would have involved them ringing up pretty much everyone they knew to see if they knew this person and if not, to get them to ring up everyone they knew to see if they knew this person! Are you confused yet?! Maybe we should try it one day!!!

Anyhow, tonight the eve of my first real day of work!!! I really can't believe that after 19 years of education leading up to this moment, I'm finally here!!! Oh did I tell you about our RMO Association dinner? It was really really nice! And classy too! It was at the Malaya Restaurant at King St Wharf. The dinner was a great opportunity to meet some of the outgoing 2005 interns, many of whom will be staying at Bankstown as RMOs (ooops - for the non-medically inclined, RMO stands for Resident Medical Officer which is what you become after your year of internship). They were super super friendly and even said that they'd set up a buddy system and have a list of them we can contact if we run into any trouble whatsoever! I can't tell you how comforting it is to know that! There's probably going to be heaps of stuff I don't know how to do, and heaps of stuff I don't even know I should be doing! It's nice knowing that there are friendly people willing to go out of their way to help us get settled and find our feet!

Well I should probably go to bed now! Wouldn't want to be suffering from fatigue on my first day of work! Signing out, Dr Ben! (so going to have to get used to that!!! =P)