I work in a county office and about 30% of the time I love what I do. It's assisting people in need, helping frail elderly and disabled stay in their homes and out of convalescent hospitals or even worse, off the streets homeless. About 70% of this job is paperwork and number-crunching. It is tedious and despicable that I should be paid top dollar to do this paper doll nursing.
Recently I took time out of my weekend routine to visit the parent of a client, a child still suffering the disabilities of premature birth, probably thanks to glyphosate. The caregiver parent hates returning phone calls, and I don't blame her. I've been in her corner now for the last few weeks, trying to get her annual renewal of services completed, having run into the bureaucratic brick wall. You see, her husband works graveyard shift at a lumber mill where he's working with dangerous machinery. He is home during the day and sleeping or taking care of some other aspect of his own personal hygiene. Although he's probably sleeping, he's considered by most of my colleagues to be At Home and Therefore Fit to Assist, disqualifying the family from our program. "People juggle schedules all the time," one of these coworkers stated. It's my cynical yet educated guess at this point that she probably first needed to know my position on the matter so she could take the very opposite stance, thanks to the orders for hassle factor, White Glove Treatment and all other imaginable flagellation that came down from management a couple of years ago.
After much discussion and mulling over the situation, my supervisor informed me she's now in agreement that the night shift working parent should be considered physically and/or mentally incapable of assisting. But he'll need a doctor's note saying so. That is, he needs a prescription for regular, uninterrupted sleep.
I'm a bachelors of science graduate with a RN license and public health certification (clearly unnecessary to know humans need regular sleep), yet still not qualified enough in our currently dysfunctional and barely covert fascist oligarchy to present this evidence. Our present day establishment deems it necessary for a person to obtain a doctor's note to prove they need regular, uninterrupted sleep. Thank goodness I also have a community college degree in journalism so that I'm at least marginally qualified to report on this madness.
Yes, people juggle schedules, they're forced to multitask all the time despite the research that now officially spells out what everyday people already know: Multitasking slows us down, and skipping sleep leads to health and safety risks. People working in the timber industry end up losing a finger in a mishap at work or worse. Maybe if they're the doctor working call at the hospital, they amputate the wrong leg. How often does that happen? Often enough for folks to write in permanent marker on their loved ones' legs going into surgery, AMPUTATE THIS LEG and DO NOT AMPUTATE THIS LEG. I wonder if the family doctor writing the note will appreciate our plight.
This strain in my career as an holistic public health nurse is not a new one. I've been hitting this wall repeatedly for years. One day, after we've all debriefed as the German people did after WWII, rays of sunshine will break through, and we'll wonder how we all couldn't see the horrors of corporatism that strives to turn the entire planet into a concentration camp and people into robots; efficient, unquestioning, compliant minions who will do anything in order for our masters to profit bigtime.
I can state all this now that I've put in my 2 week notice. One day soon as has happened repeatedly in the past, my presently unconventional and nonlinear thinking will be vindicated.
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