Was this a fair consequence?

[danachap1]

Sometimes, I feel I set myself up for failure. I took 3needles from a supply room to give myself my B 12 shots. A nurse turned me in and I was fired. I feel I knew what I did was wrong, but, really lose your job over less than 3.00 dollars. What do y'all think??

[kakamegamama]

Consequences follow actions. Your action was theft. Your consequence was being fired.

[nurseprnRN, BSN, RN]

for what it's worth, oscar wilde, being a gay englishman, would likely not have made this offer to a woman nor used dollars as the currency. it has been attributed to many wits, but most often in this form to g. bernard shaw.

hook, line & sinker

george bernard shaw once found himself at a dinner party, seated beside an attractive woman. "madam," he asked, "would you go to bed with me for a thousand pounds?" the woman blushed and rather indignantly shook her head.

"for ten thousand pounds?" he asked. "no. i would not." "then how about fifty thousand pounds?" he continued.

the colossal sum gave the woman pause, and after further reflection, she coyly replied: "perhaps." "and if i were to offer you five pounds?" shaw asked.

"mr. shaw!" the woman exclaimed. "what do you take me for!" "we have already established what you are," shaw calmly replied. "now we are merely haggling over the price."



[this tale is probably apocryphal.]

[sharpeimom]

right you are! blush! i had just finished proofing a paper on wilde for a colleague of my husband's and had wilde on the brain!!

i did indeed mean shaw!

[xoemmylouox, ASN, RN]

I you steal expect at some point you will have pay. Nothing is free. Sorry.. Best of luck with your job hunt.

[CrunchRN, ADN, RN]

What about all that stuff y'all haul home in your pockets? Is that not stealing?

I think you made a stupid mistake and an error in judgement, but I don't think you deserve to be burned at the stake. Their are meany forms of stealing. Taking extra break time is technically stealing.

What I would do is make sure you get a drug test so the board of nursing does not think you were stealing drugs or stealing needles for illicit drugs.

If you can prove that I don't believe you will lose your license for a lapse in judgement.

[silverbat]

intentionally taking something is more an issue than inadvertantly taking alcohol wipes or tape home.

[dirtyhippiegirl, BSN, RN]

Meh. In the jobs that I've worked at, there's a tacit understanding of what can and cannot be "diverted" from the unit. I've worked and done clinicals on units where taking a single juice from the patient fridge was severely frowned upon -- to places where it was fairly common to see nurses overriding for tylenol for personal use. Personally, my inhaler spacer was diverted from the ER's stockpile by my father (who is a long-time ER doc there)...and I was welcome to take home what probably amounted to a few hundred dollars of wound care dressings on the unit I currently work on in order to practice on my off-time.

I make no claims as to what is right or wrong in these situations. But it at least seems like the OP misread the "culture" of her unit.

[Meriwhen, ASN, BSN, MSN, RN]

OP: I'm sure you figured out by now that you were in the legal wrong. I think that if you really needed them, you should have asked supervisor if you could have a couple of needles for your medication than to just take them on your own.

I wish you the best of luck in the future.

[Ladybluebell]

I think maybe the fact that you took needles is part of the issue. You can say they were for B12 shots, but how can your manager be sure that was true. I'm not saying you were taking them for anything else, but usually when someone is taking needles or syringes its for something other than B12.

[rn undisclosed name]

We all inadvertently take things home. It's unfortunate you were turned in for doing so. Maybe you would have gone on to steal other things and then again maybe you wouldn't. No one know that except for you. Others have done much worse and nothing is done. Always remember that no matter how much you think you can trust a coworker - you really can't. I work with one nurse who I am very friendly with but I have some things I just don't tell her and never will. I have been burned in the past. In the end everyone is worried about their own behind and no matter how much you think you can trust a coworker - you can't.

[sharpeimom]

to me there's a huge difference between inadvertently taking home a couple alcohol wipes packages or a pen or a couple of 4x4 envelopes and deliberately helping myself to three syringes. three anythings really. i bought a suture removal kit once and used

it to take cat sutures out when it unexpectedly dipped below zero. buying one from work was easier than a trek to the vet's office.

[Vespertinas]

People steal from work. Employees often are the greater source of "shrinkage" than customers themselves. This I learned in retail. I can name you egregious cases of worker theft from different labor sectors but the problem here (one of them) is you got caught. If you get caught, you don't get to ask if your punishment was "fair". You took that risk yourself.