Normally I can express myself on this forum with humor, but not this time, at least not as usual. I just came out of a meeting (you know; one of those meetings where we sip cognac and eat bonbons and devise plans on how to abuse the staff). I sat down at my desk to get back to my grant proposal on back safety equipment. I'm doing a Capital Equipment Request Form. I'm sure brilliant financial minds created this form, but my gifts, to put it mildly, don't lie in this direction, so filling out this form is like having my nose hairs extracted without anesthesia. But nurses and transporters are getting hurt and hey, this is one of those cushy administrative jobs, better than slogging away at the bedside, right???
This is my fourth 10-12 hour day this week. I will be here tomorrow. I do not make overtime. I also do not make $36/hr, with shift differential, critical care differential, travel pay and housing, like the Winter staffing package I just saw at the meeting. I still remember how to work at the bedside and I loved it. I could be earning twice what I am earning now with substantially fewer hours. I am stupid.
I clicked on Allnurse to clear my brain before I went back to having my nosehairs removed. Instead, I found three consecutive threads on suit-bashing. On how working short is lousy and mandatory overtime sucks and management just doesn't care about the lousy quality of those crummy nurses who make those awful mistakes.
Get a freakin clue!!! So you're working short and you call your manager? Where in the heck is he supposed to get the nurses, if he's called everyone on the call list and all of your peers and every agency in town???? Out of his butt??? If he comes in to help you after working in his office all day (painting his toenails, of course), how useful do you think he's going to be? You'll just bi*** that he doesn't know what he's doing--and you'll probably be right (after all; he hasn't been at the bedside since 1492). And yes, you needed that mental health day and no, you sure as heck weren't going to work that unfair mandatory overtime. And I'm the first to say that a life-saving profession deserves every penny it gets, but unfortunately sometimes, when large sums of money are offered, the people attracted are people who are attracted only to money.
And that selfsame manager is dealing with your substance-diverting "peer" and your unsafe "peer", along with regulatory agencies that can put us all out of a job. I heard that manager behind closed doors wishing she'd caught things sooner, wondering if she was being too critical, questioning and doubting and hurting and wishing she could do a better job and feeling nothing she does can ever be right. I felt her pain, just like I feel yours in this forum.
And I'm dead tired, and I'm crying right now, and I'm wondering why in the hell I don't just forget what I'm doing and go back to the bedside because I was happy there and bedside nurses don't know or understand or appreciate or value what I'm trying to do or their managers are trying to do or their administrators are trying to do. Somewhere, there is a factory that manufacturers us, kind of like the battery-operated All-nurse one, but this is an Ice-water Suit one (maybe that will be a humorous thread when I'm in a better mood). And when I hit this submit button, I'll probably regret doing it, especially when the slingshots and cannons and loogy-spewing machines are aimed at me. Well---let it rip. I may regret this tomorrow, but tonight I'm too fed up myself to care.