Coming and Going


We had another Going Away luncheon yesterday. We have these lot now. People come in, get trained, draw a few checks and then figure out it is not going to get any better and they will never get an office with a door. They either flee back to the private sector where they won't get a door either but will get a better check and less paperwork and probably better quality office supplies or they leave one state job for another state job hoping for at least a better maintained building to work in and maybe a computer running Windows 98. It's very sad.

They also retire, for a while no one left and no one came and it was kind of nice, I got to know names and put names to faces, which is hard for me. I really am not going to recognize you or remember your name unless I see you everyday and you have a reason to keep repeating your name to me. It takes a while but I can learn who you are. The smart people are leaving and we're hiring dumb people. The dumb people who are all ready here, never leave. They know they are dumb and kind of grasp that chances are, no one else will hire them. They're dumb, they aren't stuiped. Okay, a couple of them are stupid. The scary thing is these people once worked with actual patients. Lives were in their hands. These are people I don't trust to put paper into the copy machine correctly and once upon a time they gave injections and passed meds. I am reasonably sure that if they where not required to wear nametags, that they wouldn't know their own names. These are people with degrees!.

It took me a long time of working in healthcare to let go of the All Nurses Are Florence Nightingale idea. Most of them aren't even Flo from Alice. Kind of sad. But really, that's not very many of them. They work really hard, they get all the worst jobs to do and people treat them as little better then maids in scrubs. But for every ten that are brilliant and amazing and the light of goodness flows through them there is at least one that will get confused by her shoe laces and ends up tying herself to her chair. She works here.

What else. I saw an announcement in the church bulletin that said they would be holding a blessing of the animals next week in the church parking lot. I'm so there. I might even come early and camp out to make sure I get Mr. Kitty in there. I'm not all that worried about Dogger. Dogger is a happy well-adjusted, reasonably well behaved dog. She's going to be okay. She's a good dog, but she could be a better dog, a little holy water might keep her on the straight and narrow, Kitty on the other hand, Kitty needs help. He can't go through life only having one person he does not hate. I think he may need more then a blessing, I think he needs to be fully immersed.

Speaking of immersion, We're still waiting on Jeanne.

edited to add - Still waiting, but there as an email this morning asking for managers to give names of people who they would let volunteer for recovery efforts.