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.