The Five People You Meet in Hell

So...working 12 hour days at a hospital is hard.

On the other hand, you get funny quotes, like this one from a demented syncopal woman:

"I'm ninety-one... or ninety-two years old!!"

A basic conversation with her was like dealing with someone with a bit of Assberger's or Tourette's syndrome. It didn't matter what you said, she'd come back with something really, really mean and ironically extremely humorous, not to mention laced with profanity:

"Goddamit it, get away from me! [Pause, face brightens]. Did you know you have the name of my grandson? [Face darkens into nasty scowl again.] Hey! Watch it! What do I look like, stupid?! Goddammit, let me out of bed! I demand to get up and go pee! This bedrest is stupid! If I fall, I fall. I'm ninety one years old-- screw you, get out of my room."

Or maybe it's only humorous if you are already crazy yourself.

I thought it was really funny, because I've learned at this job you either laugh at the crazy demented people or you end up on your days off driving sharpened sticks under your fingernails to distract you from the residual annoyance and emotional stress.

Meanwhile, another Wurkplace irony was brought to my attention. We're in the middle of what is getting to be a very ugly shortage of nurses on my floor, forcing the day folks to rotate to nights. It's causing a lot of bad feelings all the way around (the night nurses are complaining day shifters should just suck it up and realize it's a day-night rotating position, and the day nurses complaining because hey, there's a reason we didn't sign up for nights, and that reason is that we've already tried various combinations of smack and speed to stay awake all night, and guess what... IT DIDN'T WORK.)

Any way, petty infighting aside, one of the nurses noted that now that we're short staffed, the evening/night people won't get their retention bonuses. The mysterious "rationale" for this brilliant idea comes from the same executive management that is proudly announcing a $15 million dollar satellite cancer center but cries poverty when hiring nurses to properly staff their already existing facilities. As far as I understood it, the evening/night bonuses are only paid out if we maintain adequate staffing numbers. So, practically speaking, if five of your co-workers quit (and it's actually like seven or eight, plus two going on maternity leave in a month) then you don't get your retention bonus, even though you are still showing up at your job and haven't left, and now in order to fill in staffing gaps, you're also working overtime and rotating to shifts that only the undead and their victims prefer.

Not that I get a retention bonus, because I am a day-night rotator, and haven't been there long enough to qualify, but that's hardly the point, is it? The point is that given this kind of "logic", the next thing executive management will dream up is that nurses on poorly staffed floors should receive a five percent wage decrease just for showing up at our jobs, because obviously now that we're working short staffed, we're just going to be working even more overtime to compensate, thus wasting more of the hospital's budget with stupid pointless shit like nursing care.