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.