Mine mine mine mine...

Mine! Actually, not mine. Nothing here in my place of work is mine. I am sitting in an office that is not mine, using a computer that is not mine and dealing with problems that are not mine. Nothing here is mine and I wouldn’t want it if it were mine. Why then do so many people I work with lay personal claims to everything that is in there sight?

I am sure that this phenomenon has something to do with personal work space, and pride in ones job, which are things that I do not care about. Perhaps if I were truly in hell and this was my career, I would say things like give me back my pen and get the fuck out of my office. If I am lucky though those things will never be uttered in this building. If they are I have certainly given up on my life.

Some of the most grievous instances of this kind of mentality are typical of the kind of out and out bitchiness that defines my place of work and co-workers. One of my favorite incidents involved "someone" eating a lettuce at a desk where one of my co-workers usually sits. Of course I was blamed for this insurrection which I presume is because I am the only one who eats vegetables…unless of course they are deep fried or have dip with them. Naturally I denied having done such a thing and will continue to deny every having done such a thing. I am the someong though, I did eat lettuce at the desk, and I did get some on the floor, and no, I did not pick it up. Why? Because the bitch that sits there has about 15 pairs of payless shoes under the desk and I was not going to be groping around down there to pick up some errant lettuce. It is no matter though, because as much as she would like to think so, I did not befoul her desk because that desk is not her's at all.

The lettuce incident is old news though. What is new and fresh is the battle over the emergency waiting room television. A short note about the configuration of my work space. I sit at a desk in the middle of a waiting room and act as I doorman, information booth, and offical channel changer. I was always against the idea of the television as I knew it was not at all going to placate people who don’t want to wait. Lo and behold my assumptions were correct. No one watches the TV, no one cares that it is there to dull the pain of waiting. All they want is for me to put on what they want to watch. In a room of 25 different people, there are 25 different things that they want to watch. I take the middle road though and I put on Fox News which pleases no one.

Patients wanting possession of the television is not the problem though. The problem is in who has control of the remote in the middle of the night, where there are no patients, no doctors, and only one nurse. Angry e-mails have been sent out by the head nurse bemoaning my and my co-worker's failure to turn over the remote at the end of the night. The e-mail says things like “the TV was purchased with my budget and now my nurses are not allowed to have the remote?”

I see three problems here. The first is the budget. The TV was certainly not purchased from this own woman’s personal budget. It was purchased with the hospitals money, and it will remain the property of the hospital. The second problem is “my nurses”. Apparently she owns those as well. That explains how they made it from the nursing home to the treatment room, they were purchased cheaply. The third, and perhaps my glaringly obvious problem is that…..THE IS A FIGHT OVER THE REMOTE! Happening interdepartmentally! Over e-mail! And with meetings!

If there is a lesson here about material possession and ownership I am not sure quite what it is but I will say that if the people I work with want to say the things that surround them here and theirs, they can have them.

Secret Rendezvous

I have a confession to make. For some months now, and I don’t know how it happened, I have been having fairly regular communiqués with the head of a Human Resources department at a major university. This person is a friend of my family who made the unfortunate mistake of making grand overtures about her ability to get me a job, while in the presence of my mother. Really, this sordid HR predicament was thrust upon me! I wasn’t looking for this kind of thing! I never thought I was the kind of person who would have respect for someone working in human resources. Even now, the thought makes me feel kind of dirty.

I must admit though, in the beginning, that the more I thought about landing the kind of job that does not evoke (at least in my mind) eight hours in the dunking chair, the more I wanted to think about such an outlandish and provocative situation. To think, me, in a situation where I did not have to open doors for people, or get vomited on, or have to plug my nose because it smells like the living dead! This is truly the stuff of fantasies and it is ultimately what drew me into the loving application pool of jobs that I am so not qualified for.

For months I have been working with my HR ally, combing through job posts, looking for loopholes to exploit or hiring managers to take advantage of, and for so long there was nothing. Then all of a sudden (and mysteriously after a phone conversation with my mother inquiring about why I did not yet have a new job) an interview was set up, or more clearly “a few” interviews “would be” set up. Never one to get my hopes up I settled for the one interview that was thrown my way. In true cronyism fashion, the interview was set up for me, then I was told what the job was, then I was told to actually apply for it. At the very least, I now understand how it is exactly that HR operates: interview then application. I have had it all wrong for so long.

After one major snag (just an HR underling setting up the interview with the wrong person and on the wrong day) things were poised to improve exponentially for me. Then I got a cold. No big deal though, what’s a touch of fever delirium during an interview? If anything it made me more charming or at least, more quirky…which always translates into more fun. Right? Right?!

I doubt very much that I would go on a first date while suffering from the fever delirium, so I don’t know what I opted to conduct an interview in such a state. Thankfully (and like most dates I have been on) this job was summarily rejected before the interview began. The reason? The receptionist was positioned in the middle of a hallway outside of the office and there was a student sleeping on a couch next to her. If I wanted to deal with that kind bullshit I would become a desk in a hospital. I did not even need to hear the functions of the job, to know that this was not going to be for me. This kind of position works out best for me because it allows me to maintain the veneer of control when really, I was never actually going to get the job anyway. It’s win win really.

On thing is certain though, I have learned that I cannot leave my current job in favor of a hot new job just because it is something different. After a while I am sure that I would have been longing for the insults, and the vomit, and the comparisons to office furniture that I have come to define my character as a disgruntled employee.

Disrespected Employee

I really thought that I would reach my most disgruntled level by being an unemployee, but really I have never been more disgruntled an employee than I am right now. I will take the nonsensical rigmarole of submitting applications and going on interviews that lead nowhere over what I am experiencing now. I would even enjoy a job that was a little more dish and soap-centric at the moment over what I am currently doing.

You see, I work in a hospital which really is more like an overpriced boutique featuring maladies of the head and neck. I think of this place as a boutique simply because the patients are referred to as customers…and as a matter of fact it is customer service week here at the hospital. When I think of customer service week I think of Wal-Mart and smocks and malcontents. Although I suppose where there is the general public, be they patients or customers or accident victims with credit cards, there is certainly no shortage of malcontents. I faithfully count myself among them because to be contented would mean I had no self respect.

Working here is beginning to be a sign that I may have self respect issues, or perhaps masochistic tendencies. Most people dislike all or some of the aspect of their job, but I am a little bit different. I enjoy what I do, because I don’t have to use my brain, I don’t really have to remember anything, and I am afford a lot of free time for doing things, like biting the hand that feeds me. What I absolutely loathe is the treatment and general presence of other employees. I work in a department that has been called “the bottom of the barrel” by the president of the hospital, and that attitude extends to the employees of the department. I am the unfortunate victim of bad company, because this title is not at all undeserved. Truly, everyone I am forced to work with day in and day out is nothing more than a sub-literate sycophantic peon. All that really needs to be said about the subject is that I am the most highly educated person in my department all the way on up to the director…and that is not even counting the bartending course I took 5 years ago.

It is not co-workers who cause the problems though, mainly because they are barely able to handle the intricacies of a pen and paper. The real source of my malcontent is the way I am treated by people who know better, physicians and managerial types. I had one manager walk by me not too long ago and refer to me as “the help”. The last time I checked I was not dusting lampshades in a Newport mansion or driving some bitter old heiress to afternoon tea. Yes, I was called “the help” from a woman who, when she ascended the corporate stepping stool from supervisor to manager was, on her first day, punched full on in the face by one of her own employees. I work in the kind of place that not only has people thinking of me as the help, but also has routine physical violence. Super classy.

Being “the help” at least recognizes my status as a human person capable of doing human things. Just the other day a physician and his patient…I mean customer…walked up to me, pointed in my face and said “maybe this desk can help you”. Why not “maybe this PERSON can help you”? I guess once you have achieved the super difficult and rare title of MD you no longer see the people at the end of your ill-pointed finger as human any more but rather, as office furniture.

When I am not engaged in being a desk though, I am primarily the emergency room bouncer. Through some combination of being nice to someone once, and offering to hold the door for a stretcher, my unofficial primary duty is to open the door for people who are too lazy to move their arms three inches to their waits, pull their ID cards from their lanyards, and grant themselves access to the treatment rooms. This is not the kind of things doctors do. They certainly did not go to medical school to open doors. Neither did the secretary go to filing school to open doors. And the janitor, he most certainly did not go to jail to wind up opening doors for himself, although he will help himself to the contents of my bag whenever he wishes.

The door is the bane of my existence, and I could (and have) go on for thousands of words extolling my dislike of the door and my unofficial role as maven of the door. The most recently display of complete and utter disrespect directed towards me was having my latest door-centric rant sent by my boss to her boss and another boss. While I am certainly not under the assumption that any of my actions are private and with out scrutiny, I do (or did) hold on to a small vestige of hope that I was respected enough to have my private e-mails to my boss kept private. I should not have been surprised by this though, since my boss is so far down on the literacy scale that she is hardly able to compose a grammatically correct subject line, let alone dozens of coherent sentences full of syntax and an overall theme.

I have expended a lot of time on the door but I have not really explained what it is I do. I work in an emergency room and my job is to make sure that patients are checked in to see a doctor. I am not in fact a doorman, or the help, or a desk, or even the help desk. I am a registrar and if you look registrar up in the dictionary it says nothing about being a desk or opening a door. Of course the other registrars are not aware of the existence of dictionaries and may have come to believe they are in fact desks. I don’t know though, because I have never cared to ask, because I never cared.

Next time, stories about how a group of interns mistook me for a lectern and took me to a conference.