No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

[OCNRN63]

I thought those words earlier today after reading another thread that started to go sideways because some had an issue with the OP. This seems to be happening frequently; the OP will start a thread with the best of intentions; then someone responds with personal attacks against the OP (and misses the point of the post); then others pile on additional negative posts against the OP,

rendering the thread useless.

I wonder if those who try to debate the poster and not the post do anything to make AN a more welcoming place. Do they share their knowledge or experience with others? What have they done to become a valued member of AN?

I'm sure I'll be criticized for starting this thread. I may even have a few people take shots at me. I'm tough; if I can handle cancer, I can handle criticism from anonymous posters on a forum.

So how have you helped to make AN a positive place where nurses can learn from each other?

[nursel56]

So farewell, my beloved nursing students (with apologies to Esme) with questions on med math and physiology, new grads who are mystified by confusing situations, and people who want to change their focus from bedside to my specialty. For better or worse, it's been good being with you. Good night, and good luck.

Take a breather. I'd say most of us have done this for one reason or another. The perspective change is healthy. I for one hope you don't lock the door and throw away the key.

[Ruby Vee, BSN]

Those of you who know better will realize that with more than 800,000 paying members AN is big business, and has its own form of Press-Gainey. The recent thread on how the Customer Service trend in hospitals is bound to die a slow death (but "bound to" does mean inevitable) because giving everyone what s/he wants in priority to what s/he needs for therapeutic reasons is illustrative.

Sure, you're really going to annoy a diabetic whose "management" consists of two doughnuts instead of four and making up for it by using Splenda instead of sugar when you refuse to give him all the sweets he's come to assume are his way of managing his illness-- it's worked so far, right? (Well, until it didn't.) You're going to make a family angry if you don't give their NPO dad a cheeseburger, or even a glass of water. You will be reported, via Press-Gainey or other rating scheme, for not being unfailingly nice; your employer may warn you verbally or in writing or not be inclined to grant your schedule requests.

So too on AN. You're going to annoy someone whose nursing or work or life experience hasn't yet expanded to include some personal challenges and the consequences of their actions. You're going to make someone's eyes roll with your recommendations. You're going to hurt some people's feelings if you point out the places they could have found their answers without expecting someone to hand it to them. You're going to be reported via that little yellow triangle, anonymously, and you will never know until the similarly-shaped 16,000-pound weight drops off the cliff.

Someday the hospital (probably via pressure from an external entity) will realize that Customer Service isn't working out so well in terms of outcomes. Perhaps most people will deny the idea that giving Dad that bottle of Vlasic pickles didn't have enough salt in it to really make a difference in his CHF the night he went into failure. But sooner or later, truth will out.

So too, but only to a point, on AN. Being unfailingly supportive and not caring enough to correct what will become career-ending knee injuries (in an attempt to help less-experienced practitioners avoid the mistakes we made as youngies) is a lot like helicopter/snowplow parenting toddlers and adolescents. Over-empowered children who are protected from the realities of life (or learn that when inconvenient realities rear their ugly heads, they can be safely discounted and ignored) are not going to be happy ones when they get to the world of work and discover that things are not always going to be going their way and that their opinion isn't the court of last resort. You know what Will Rogers said: "There are three kinds of men: The ones that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves."

The difference is that hospitals, even if privately held, are quasi-public institutions. There are laws against refusing the ambulance or transferring out people who come to your ER because they're uninsured, for example; you can't discharge someone from an LTAC without a safe discharge plan. There are laws about labor relations, work/hour violations, and so forth to protect the employees.

No such things apply on the internet. There is no outside entity to collect stats or even anecdotal reports. We are it. The inevitability of bad patient care or personal outcomes from newer practitioners who didn't like the advice they got from older ones will not come back to bite this forum on the gluteus maximus. So perhaps it really doesn't matter if we are all unicorns farting glitter and rainbows (I learned that terminology here). Perhaps that's all this should be.

But. There are those of us, mainly but not all older ones, who do care, and care passionately, about our profession, the vulnerable people we serve in so many capacities, and the quality of the education our newer practitioners acquire both in school and in the years to follow. We aren't trolls, and we don't mean to be intentionally cruel. But you know what? We've seen this rodeo once or twice or twenty times. We want you to know what we know without, perhaps, suffering the ways we did to learn it. If sometimes we are blunt or caustic or say things someone doesn't want to hear, that's why the god of AN gave us an ignore button*. It's no skin off our noses if you don't want to hear what we have to say. We're just casting our bread upon the waters here. (You can look it up. :) )

Perhaps the number of "likes" amassed by those crusty old bats should count for something, too, perhaps as much as the "reports," in a perfect world. Why did the victim mentality, the "I don't like it!" begin to count for more than anything else (outside of the Bill of Rights)? Is it all about the money, as in the hospitals? No, I'm reasonably certain this isn't going to happen here.

So farewell, my beloved nursing students (with apologies to Esme) with questions on med math and physiology, new grads who are mystified by confusing situations, and people who want to change their focus from bedside to my specialty. For better or worse, it's been good being with you. Good night, and good luck.

* With 800,000+ people here, I'd like to see this feature more prominently disclosed-- perhaps next to the "report" button would be a good place, and keep down everyone's blood pressure...and keep up those ever-valuable Press-Gainey scores.

I've been thinking about this post since I first saw it.

I had never ever considered that AN was "big business", but now that it's been pointed out to me, I cannot stop thinking about it. It should have been obvious. I have an MBA, I should have figured it out about the time I started paying for my Platinum membership. At the time, I wanted to help subsidize the website, to keep it open and active because I knew that students and new grads might not be able to afford the membership. (I can hear the snickering now . . . RUBY VEE paying dues to try to help newbies? Hahahahaha!) But somehow it never occurred to me that AN was a business. Dumb!

I've run afoul of AN's form of Press-Gainey on more than one occaision, offering up advice that I considered sensible and helpful to someone who didn't want sensible, helpful advice but wanted a bunch of posters to jump on their own personal "Ain't It Awful" bandwagon. "No negative posts wanted" appears more often in more threads that I would have believed a few years ago! People only want opinions that agree with them. And I've been reported via that little yellow triangle, and censored despite the fact that those posts attacking me personally remain up for all to see. (Because I didn't report them -- I never saw the need to go "running to mommy because someone was mean to me", which is essentially what that little yellow triangle is about.)

Understanding that AN is big business helps me to understand some of those moderating decisions in a whole new context. It's not just that they're ageist -- although they seem to be. It's that those young'uns who are so easily upset because because they've always been over-empowered and protected from the realities of life represent a future income stream. I don't. I'm going to retire one day in the not-too-distant future, and when I'm on a fixed income, I won't be paying for that Platinum membership, and I won't be feeling the need to subsidize those same children I've always thought I was subsidizing. It will be time for me to let someone else subsidize me for a time, in return for my good advice based on years of experience.

Only good advice, years of experience, seniority in nursing or seniority of any kind aren't really respected any more. Just my luck to become a crusty old bat in an era when my experience in nursing is ridiculed as "just meaning you haven't died or lost your license yet." The children and young adults who grew up with helicopter parents and the ability to safely ignore the ugly realities of life (because Mommy will fix that for you) may indeed have to learn by ******* on the electric fence their ownselves. What a shame! What a shame that bad patient outcomes related to newbies who chose to ignore the sage advice of crusty old bats who have neither died nor lost their licenses isn't going to take a chunk out of an internet forum's gluteus maximus. The newbies are going to have to take the hit all on their own. And eventually, if not already on some forums, we're going to have a group of the same helicopter-parented children who are sure that their own opinions ARE the court of last resort rallying round one another and assuring each other that it's OK to flunk the NCLEX 7 times -- you shouldn't give up on your dream, that the grass IS always greener elsewhere, even if you've only been at your current (first) job for three months, that nurses DO eat their young so nothing is ever your fault.

Those of us who do care passionately about our profession and about perhaps helping some newbies to navigate that extremely difficult first year of nursing without having to experience first hand some of the consequences of making dumb mistakes like the ones we've made in the distant past . . . we're not going to be around forever. Those of us who never learned to talk around in circles or sugar coat our answers aren't necessarily trolls or bullies. Some of us are sincerely trying to teach, to help the newest generation of nurses learn to navigate the workplace and the nursing unit without making the same missteps we've made or seen others make. The fact that our words aren't wrapped in rainbows and stuffed in unicorns doesn't make them less valuable or less right. Unfortunately, it does seem to make them less palatable to many.

I am often amused, when I am trying to educate some rude and stubborn child who insists upon personally attacking me in telling me I know nothing about what I speak. I look at my 28,000 "Likes" and their more paltry number, and I look at my posts in their thread which are consistently "Liked" more than their posts railing against me. Do they not look at those numbers? Maybe they cannot SEE those numbers.

But ultimately, my 28,000 likes aren't going to mean anything as the little yellow triangle gets clicked and the similarly shaped triangle falls off the 16,000 foot cliff. The victim mentality seems to rule -- and how can you NOT be a victim when your parents, who have sheltered you from every negative consequence in your life suddenly can't. At some point, those very same young'uns may be looking for help for their situation, and may be desparate enough to look for it on the internet, from some of the same Crusty Old Bats they've been gleefully disrespecting. Maybe there will still be some left.

[mclennan, BSN, RN]

Holy rant-o-rama, Ruby!!!! I could not AGREE MORE with every word you've said here. Great post! Explaining the mysterious ways of the moderators as viewing the whiny youngins as "future income streams" makes bloody PERFECT sense.

I don't really care how indelicate it sounds but I truly fear for this new generation. NEVER have I seen such self-absorbed, sheltered, inflated sense of self-importance young people, and believe me, the baby boomers were a tough act to follow in those departments!!!

[scottaprn]

The victim mentality seems to rule -- and how can you NOT be a victim when your parents, who have sheltered you from every negative consequence in your life suddenly can't.

The irony is rich since the entire post with this quote is written from a victim mentality.

[Cheyenne RN,BSHS]

I've been thinking about this post since I first saw it.

I had never ever considered that AN was "big business", but now that it's been pointed out to me, I cannot stop thinking about it. It should have been obvious. I have an MBA, I should have figured it out about the time I started paying for my Platinum membership. At the time, I wanted to help subsidize the website, to keep it open and active because I knew that students and new grads might not be able to afford the membership. (I can hear the snickering now . . . RUBY VEE paying dues to try to help newbies? Hahahahaha!) But somehow it never occurred to me that AN was a business. Dumb!

I've run afoul of AN's form of Press-Gainey on more than one occaision, offering up advice that I considered sensible and helpful to someone who didn't want sensible, helpful advice but wanted a bunch of posters to jump on their own personal "Ain't It Awful" bandwagon. "No negative posts wanted" appears more often in more threads that I would have believed a few years ago! People only want opinions that agree with them. And I've been reported via that little yellow triangle, and censored despite the fact that those posts attacking me personally remain up for all to see. (Because I didn't report them -- I never saw the need to go "running to mommy because someone was mean to me", which is essentially what that little yellow triangle is about.)

Understanding that AN is big business helps me to understand some of those moderating decisions in a whole new context. It's not just that they're ageist -- although they seem to be. It's that those young'uns who are so easily upset because because they've always been over-empowered and protected from the realities of life represent a future income stream. I don't. I'm going to retire one day in the not-too-distant future, and when I'm on a fixed income, I won't be paying for that Platinum membership, and I won't be feeling the need to subsidize those same children I've always thought I was subsidizing. It will be time for me to let someone else subsidize me for a time, in return for my good advice based on years of experience.

Only good advice, years of experience, seniority in nursing or seniority of any kind aren't really respected any more. Just my luck to become a crusty old bat in an era when my experience in nursing is ridiculed as "just meaning you haven't died or lost your license yet." The children and young adults who grew up with helicopter parents and the ability to safely ignore the ugly realities of life (because Mommy will fix that for you) may indeed have to learn by ******* on the electric fence their ownselves. What a shame! What a shame that bad patient outcomes related to newbies who chose to ignore the sage advice of crusty old bats who have neither died nor lost their licenses isn't going to take a chunk out of an internet forum's gluteus maximus. The newbies are going to have to take the hit all on their own. And eventually, if not already on some forums, we're going to have a group of the same helicopter-parented children who are sure that their own opinions ARE the court of last resort rallying round one another and assuring each other that it's OK to flunk the NCLEX 7 times -- you shouldn't give up on your dream, that the grass IS always greener elsewhere, even if you've only been at your current (first) job for three months, that nurses DO eat their young so nothing is ever your fault.

Those of us who do care passionately about our profession and about perhaps helping some newbies to navigate that extremely difficult first year of nursing without having to experience first hand some of the consequences of making dumb mistakes like the ones we've made in the distant past . . . we're not going to be around forever. Those of us who never learned to talk around in circles or sugar coat our answers aren't necessarily trolls or bullies. Some of us are sincerely trying to teach, to help the newest generation of nurses learn to navigate the workplace and the nursing unit without making the same missteps we've made or seen others make. The fact that our words aren't wrapped in rainbows and stuffed in unicorns doesn't make them less valuable or less right. Unfortunately, it does seem to make them less palatable to many.

I am often amused, when I am trying to educate some rude and stubborn child who insists upon personally attacking me in telling me I know nothing about what I speak. I look at my 28,000 "Likes" and their more paltry number, and I look at my posts in their thread which are consistently "Liked" more than their posts railing against me. Do they not look at those numbers? Maybe they cannot SEE those numbers.

But ultimately, my 28,000 likes aren't going to mean anything as the little yellow triangle gets clicked and the similarly shaped triangle falls off the 16,000 foot cliff. The victim mentality seems to rule -- and how can you NOT be a victim when your parents, who have sheltered you from every negative consequence in your life suddenly can't. At some point, those very same young'uns may be looking for help for their situation, and may be desparate enough to look for it on the internet, from some of the same Crusty Old Bats they've been gleefully disrespecting. Maybe there will still be some left.

Where do I go to give a standing ovation???? Here Here Ruby!!

Sad but true. I started on the old nursing AOL boards and moved to here as AOL boards sort of slowly croaked. I have watched so many changes, some good, some bad, some just different.

[Carpediem1012, BSN, RN]

Don't know if anyone else has noticed, but there is a lack of COB wisdom being imparted the last week or so.... I for one, am missing it- especially since school is starting again soon......wonder why....?

[JustBeachyNurse, LPN]

Perhaps the nasty, rude replies have taken their toll on the truthful, insightful and accurate responses of the helpful crew? Could just be coincidence that perhaps they are busy right now

[RNIBCLC]

What is COB?

[JustBeachyNurse, LPN]

What is COB?

Crusty old bat. An insult slung at the seasoned members when a young member didn't get the answer/aw poor baby answer they were seeking and the seasoned nurses injected a dose of reality and offered truth/reality orientation. The season members turned it around and wear the title proudly as members of the crusty old bat society.

[RNIBCLC]

Aaah! Great I love being a crusty old bat.....I'm new to AN but not to nursing.... Does that count? Or maybe a COB in training? As you can see I aspire to be a crusty old bat....

[OCNRN63, RN]

Don't know if anyone else has noticed, but there is a lack of COB wisdom being imparted the last week or so.... I for one, am missing it- especially since school is starting again soon......wonder why....?

​When you realize it's not worth the effort, and that sharing that hard earned wisdom winds up making you the source of derision, then there's no point in sharing.

[Carpediem1012, BSN, RN]

I see you understand what I am saying. And I think we could potentially be losing something of great value here....