Me

I asked my readers whether or not I should give 2 weeks’ notice. Giving two weeks’ notice doesn’t mean anything, and when it comes time to get rid of employees, employers are quick to point out that Florida is an “at will” employment state where you can be terminated at any time, for any reason. I gave a month’s notice to one job when I left for PA school in a different state, and left on what I thought were good terms. They even threw me a going away party. I am on the “no rehire” list.

Well, I gave two weeks’ notice last week. I drove into work and had a very cordial conversation with my manager. I told him the story about how the HR director wouldn’t even offer to pay more in order to keep me. His response was that the HR director should not have been so unprofessional, and that he would be mentioning it to the Chief of Nursing. He then told me that I would like working at my new hospital, because he has heard a lot of good things about them. I am the third nurse this month to head over there, just from my department. He told me that I was great at my job, and the department would be worse off without me. It was very cordial.

So what happened next? My current employer fired me this morning. By text message. This is the text message I just got from my manager:

We are removing you from the schedule for this week and next week. So now you can move forward with your new position.

Cowards. They didn’t even have the guts to tell me I was fired, or to do it to my face. Instead, I get “removed from the schedule.” This proves is that the old standard of giving a two week notice is no longer the norm in the United States. It would have been better for me if I had simply worked to the end, then told them on the way out the door at the end of my last shift that I wouldn’t be returning. Doing the “right” thing just cost me two weeks’ pay.

You will recall that I was told that they couldn’t come close to paying me what other hospitals are offering me, even though they are paying H1C visa people $1 an hour more, and are paying contract nurses $20 an hour more than they are paying me. I haven’t yet put in my 2 weeks’ notice. I was planning on doing that this week. The problem? Since I am PRN, I was just notified that I have been taken off the schedule this week because the ED has a low census.

Last week, they had me come in 4 hours late one day, then had me leave 4 hours early the next. So I was 8 hours short last week. Now I am an entire week short this week. Hazard of being PRN, I guess. It’s enough to make it feel personal.

As for the low census? We are a 50 bed ED, requiring 14 nurses to staff for the shift. On busy days, we have as many as 90 patients at once, but 70 or so is the norm. That means we have patients stacked in the hallways on reclining chairs, and there are as many as 12 to 15 patients to a nurse. The days that I had my hours cut short? We had a full ED at 52 patients for 50 beds. So they sent me home. It wasn’t just me who was sent home early. I was on the midshift, meaning all of the nurses and techs who come in at 9am, 11 am, and 1 pm for their 12 hour shifts. The entire midshift- 3 nurses, 4 technicians, and a paramedic, were sent home at 7pm, even though we were full at 52 patients.

Nurses have remarked, “As long as we keep doing this, they will keep making us do it, until it becomes the ‘way we have always done things.’ Then we will be expected to run shorthanded.”

It looks like those days are here. Remember when they were squawking that the ICU was overrun with patients because they were at 95% capacity? That’s where the hospital purposely keeps itself- to maximize profits. So you lower capacity to match demand, except that in this case, they are keeping the hospital’s ED at over 100% capacity, which is dictated by nurses.

Not my problem in two and a half weeks. Now I am asking- should I even bother giving two weeks’ notice?

There was no post today because the wife and I went to Saint Petersburg for the night. We had a lovely dinner at Doc Ford’s Rum bar on the Saint Pete pier. The hogfish was fresh and delicious. Then we went to see the Devil Rays play the Yankees before hanging out for some Cinco De Mayo festivities in the downtown area. We spent the night and returned this afternoon. A good date night.

I want to add that there are metal detectors at Tropicana field, and it isn’t legal to carry in there. However, pepper spray is legal to carry there, as it isn’t considered a weapon. I would also add that I have pepper spray that doesn’t seem to ever get picked up by magnetometers. I’m sure it is on the list of prohibited items, but prohibited isn’t the same thing as illegal.

Big Country asks why people would join the Navy. He asks, I will explain. Back when I was in high school, I took the ASVAB. That sucker is widely considered to be the best vocational aptitude exam ever. I got one point short of a perfect score. The only section that I didn’t get a perfect score on was called “speed coding.” It was the section where you are given a decoder sheet of random letters, an encoded message, and are asked to decode it for time. I missed a perfect score by a single point. IIRC, a perfect score at the time was a 99, and I got a 98.

So as a result, the offers poured in. Now I was one of those guys who had known that I wanted to serve for as long as I can remember. I was young, naïve, and loved my country. With this being the Reagan years, and being a kid raising himself on a diet of Heinlein, Mack Bolan, and the like, I wanted to serve. But where?

• The Coast Guard wanted to send me to the academy and make me an officer. I would have owed them 8 years of service.
• The Army was going to make me a Warrant Officer and a helicopter pilot
• The Marines wanted to train me as an avionics repairman as an E3
• The Navy wanted to make me a Nuclear Power plant operator for 6 years, with a rank of E4
• The Air Force wouldn’t promise me anything in advance, sign up for 4 years and take your chances

As an 18 year old, I wasn’t ready for the 12 year commitment of the Coast Guard. The Air Force worried me, as I didn’t want to wind up as a wing washer or a cook. My father convinced me that the Navy would teach me skills as a power plant operator that I wouldn’t get in the Marines. He said that Avionics repair in the military was just swapping one black box for another. I took his word for it.

So it was between Army and Navy. The Navy recruiter’s pitch sounded sooo much better. What I didn’t know at the time was that the Navy was having difficulty filling the ranks with people who had done well on ASVAB because the Air Force was taking all of them. That’s why the AF didn’t have to make promises or offer big promotions.

So how did the Navy fix that? They promised all sorts of money, tech school, and promotions. Once you were in, they found every reason that they could to wash you out of the two year long training pipeline. The only program in the Navy with a higher washout rate is the SEAL program. That way, they can fill the ranks with smart people who otherwise would have been lost to other branches of the service. That’s why the washout rate is over 80%, even though the Navy claims its only around 10%. When I was in boot camp, one in five recruits were nukes, but the vast majority wouldn’t make it. This was before Top Gun made everyone think they were going to be a pilot and sleep with hot chicks while thumbing your nose at officers from the motorcycle you would ride down the runway.

I was washed out of Nuclear Power School and sent to the fleet. For what?

The school had a policy that you were assigned a study plan. The minimum GPA to remain in the program was 3.0. There were three levels to the plan: Voluntary, Suggested, and Mandatory. Being assigned suggested 16 meant that they suggested you study 16 hours per week. What we were learning was classified, so all studying had to be done in the classroom. Your notes had to stay in the classroom. Study hours were 2 hours a night Monday through Thursday and eight hours a day on Saturday and Sunday.

I had a GPA of 3.4 and was assigned mandatory 20. Another guy in my class was assigned voluntary hours, but his GPA was 3.2. When I asked about the disparity and pointed out its unfairness, I was told “That’s as good as I think he can do, but I think you can do better.”

Being a rather immature 18 years old, I wasn’t about to submit to this injustice and study 2 hours every weeknight plus six hours each on Saturday and Sunday, so I didn’t do it. Like I said, I was immature. Not only that, I don’t get a benefit from studying like that. I’m not that sort of learner. Not making excuses. It was immature and stupid on my part, but that is how washouts happen. They regularly catch people for various offenses and send them to the fleet. Someone has to mop floors, clean spaces, and serve officers their dinner as waiters in the officers’ mess.

So I went to NJP, was dropped from E4 to E3, got booted from Power School, and sent to the fleet, becoming what Navy people euphemistically call “Nuke Waste.” I was shocked when I arrived at my command, an aircraft carrier, and more than three quarters of the 200 non-nuclear electricians on board were nuclear waste. I still had a minimum of four years left on my enlistment. The guy who had been on voluntary hours? He got washed out the same week I did for drinking underage, also as an E3.

I spent nearly two years mopping floors, doing dishes, cleaning, and generally being untrained labor before finally being promoted back to E4. I spent the entire time wishing that I had taken the deal to be an Army helicopter pilot.

Does it come through that I am bitter? It should. I think that the six years I spent in the Navy was wasted time that I could have better spent elsewhere, although I know that college at the time would not have been a good idea for me. (Immature, remember? I would have found some other way to get in trouble.) Still, we make the best of where we find ourselves. I’ve done OK. I still discouraged my own kids from joining the military.

So, I have been continuing to get ready for our move. I’m sitting here on my day off, looking at things. (Ever since I made it known that I am looking for a job, extra hours have become harder to come by. Strange for a hospital that claims to be short staffed, huh? That’s OK. I’m putting in my 2 weeks’ notice next week. I’m taking a month off when the wife’s school is done for the year.)

One of the things I am doing is looking at changing the way that we handle Internet and Television. That system is a ripoff thanks to what they call “bundling.” I have seen Greek instruction manuals that are less confusing than our cable bill. Let me give you an example:

• They charge me $102 for Internet service that is nominally at 800MBps. When I check it, the best I get is around 50-70 MBps. My in-laws live 2 miles away and are getting 250 MBps, according to speedtest. So I decide that I am not paying for speed that I’m not getting and look to see what a lower speed would save me. Lowering my speed to 400 would actually RAISE my bill by $22 a month. Going to 200 would raise my bill by $34 a month. Yeah, I know that they have a disclaimer that says speed can vary, but only getting 10% of what they are advertising seems to be a bit much.

• Now on to television. My wife watches far more of it than I do, but I do occasionally watch. Mostly movies, hockey, and old television shows. My wife loves watching shows like medical dramas. I can’t stand those, but we gotta keep the wife happy. They charge us $91 for 185 channels. Cutting it to the 125 channel option would save us a whopping 94 cents per month. If I go to only 10 channels, it would save me $40, but I can get those same 10 channels with an antenna.
• Then there are the add-ons. They charge us $30 for three cable boxes, another $10 for DVR service, $6 for the remote controls so we can use their cable boxes, and a bunch of other things like sports fees, local service fees, and sales tax. Then they give us some bull hockey ‘discount’ for a “bundle” and our entire Internet/Cable bill? $225 a month. Holy shit.

Believe it or not, this is the better of the providers in our area. We tried DSL. That service has even slower Internet. We tried DirecTV, but every time it rains or even gets cloudy, we lose TV service. It rains in Florida every day.

So I am looking at our new neighborhood. There are two high speed providers in the area, both claiming to offer 1000 MBps. I will be overjoyed to get a quarter of that speed. The cost looks to be $70 a month, but I can’t be sure, as my address doesn’t exist yet, so they won’t give me a quote.

At that point, I think I am going to switch to streaming. My choices, as I see it, are YoutubeTV, DirecTV streaming, or HULU +live TV. Does anyone else have other suggestions?

We had our monthly department meeting this morning. There’s nothing like going in to work on your day off so you can be told a bunch of corporate rah-rah garbage that easily could have been an email. One of the things that they did was hired a bunch of nurses, techs, and a couple of doctors. One of the nurses that they hired is from the mid-east. As in, the UAE. She has never been a nurse in the US before, and her US license is brand new. Her English is pretty good.

That’s what confused me. So I told you last month that I ran into the HR director at a job fair, and they tried to recruit me because they didn’t even recognize me. Then, once I told them what I was being offered by other hospitals, told me that they couldn’t come close to matching it. The UAE nurse? They are paying her $1.00 per hour more than I was asking for. I don’t think it was personal, because the HR director didn’t even know my name when she told me that there was no way I could get that much.

I don’t understand why they would rather bring in people from other countries than pay the employees that they already have enough to get them to stay. I guess it doesn’t matter- I am out of there. My last day is less than 6 weeks away, and I haven’t even told them yet. I don’t know if I want to give much notice. That decision is day to day.

I went to a job fair yesterday. Who do I see there, other than the HR director from my hospital. Let’s call them Hospital A. She approached me and asked if I have considered a job with her hospital, you know, the one I currently work for. I responded with, “I already do. I have offers from Hospital X. I would love to stay where I am, though. After all, I have been here for two years.”

She asks me how much I am being offered. I tell her, and ask if there is any thought of matching it. She says, “Oooh. There is someone I would like to introduce you to.”

She walks me over to the next table and introduces me to the HR director for Hospital Y. The one I interviewed with last week, who had already offered me a job. As soon as my HR director walked off, hospital Y HR director says, “Let’s at least steal some of the cupcakes that they are giving away.” So we ate some of Hospital A’s cupcakes and had a laugh.

There’s my answer. I now know that I cannot stay where I am. The other hospitals have good pay and benefits. Mine has cupcakes.

I will finish out the May schedule and then take a couple of weeks off before starting my new job at Hospital X. In other news, I am also thinking about starting work on my Masters Degree in the fall.

I spent my latest shift in triage. There are two triage positions in the emergency room- one prioritizes the patients arriving by ambulance. The charge nurse usually does this. The second triage position is where patients who walk in are prioritized and sometimes treated. It was a slow day by ED standards, as we had less than 200 patients for the 12 hour shift.

The interesting patients of the day were a guy who ran his hand into a table saw, removing the tips of two fingers, a woman who came here from Canada seeking treatment that she had been unsuccessfully seeking for over a year in her home country, and a fentanyl overdose who came back to us after only being discharged 90 minutes earlier (that particular patient came to us by ambulance). The nurse who wound up treating him and I agreed that this guy obviously didn’t care about his own health and just wanted to get high, and that society would be improved if hospitals simply stopped handing out Narcan to every junkie on a constant basis. Sorry, but this guy has been in our hospital more than a dozen times in the past month. I can’t see how we benefit as a society by indulging in this behavior.

I had to teach one of our new nurses how to splint. She had to do a sugar tong splint on one of her patients for a wrist fracture, but didn’t know how. I went back and had to show her how to do it. Then a second came and asked me if D5W had sodium in it. (D5W literally means 5% dextrose in water. Why would there be sodium in that?) What are these nurses learning in school?

The worst part of the shift was the screensavers on the computers. They show a nurse I work with getting an award for saving a patient back in December. Good for her, except she got the award for what I did. A patient had come in complaining of passing out several times. No one could find anything wrong with him, even after the man had been in the ED for 2 days so they were about to discharge him. I went into the ECG server and reviewed the last 2 days of his heart activity and found that his heart occasionally went into a third degree AV block. He would then spend the next couple of minutes in a ventricular escape rhythm, and his heart rate would drop into the 20’s. There’s your problem, and I can’t believe cardiology missed it. I printed the ECG strips and gave them to his nurse, who forwarded them to cardiology. The man got a pacemaker and was sent home. The nurse got an award. I didn’t do it for accolades, but it still sucks that someone else got credit for my brilliant detective work.

Everything that follows is a “me, me, me” story, so if you aren’t interested, the post can end here.

---

I got another offer for a job this week, this time for $11 an hour more than I make now. Even though the money isn’t as good as the offer I received a month ago, the benefits are much better. Still, I’m not interested, as that particular hospital is about 45 minutes away from where I live and I don’t feel like driving that far. Still, the jobs are there.

Perhaps the attitude about druggies is the reason why, when I had a conversation with my manager about my coming departure, he didn’t seem to care a whole lot. It went like this, “You know that hospitals around here are aggressively recruiting nurses? Did you also know that this hospital is paying more than $10 an hour less than all of the others in the area?”

He says, “Yeah, I’ve heard.”

Me: “To be honest, I have offers from two other hospitals in the area. Both are for significantly more than I make now. I want to stay here, if possible. My evals are good, above average, in fact. You say you want me to stay and value me as an employee, so what kind of a raise are you willing to give me?”

Manager: “I really can’t have this conversation right now. There are a lot of things going on, and it would be better if you came back in two weeks, and we can talk about it then. My plate is just full, and I really do want to help you, but this just isn’t the time.”

Me: “That’s what you said three weeks ago, and a month before that.”

Him: “I know. Sorry, this just isn’t the time.”

It sounds like they really DON’T value me as an employee. I can’t see any manager who cares about retaining employees saying things like that to one who is making noises like they are looking to go. I do know that they have recently (in the past three months) hired half a dozen new nurses, all fresh out of school. They aren’t hurting for nurses as badly as they were a year ago, even though we are still woefully understaffed, it’s my belief that they WANT to be understaffed. It’s cheaper that way, I guess, even if patient care suffers and nursing ratios stay at 8:1 on the floor, with 30 or 40 ED holds.

So I am going to assume that I have just gotten my answer in the form of a “pocket veto.” If they really respected and wanted me to stay, we would have had the conversation about pay and retention by now. I have done everything but put in my notice, and the manager doesn’t seem to care.

So I have decided that my last day will be in 6 weeks. In three weeks, I will put in my notice.

I had some issues with the local services.

Issue 1: So a car hit a telephone pole somewhere in the area, and we lost power for about an hour. That isn’t the bad part. The bad part is that the electrical surge that came along with it fried some electronics in the house. I wonder what a whole house surge protector costs. It seems like we are constantly losing electronics here because of power surges, although they are usually lightning related. It’s pretty much an annual event.

Issue #2: In preparing to move, we were getting rid of some bulk items. We called to have the garbage people come get them, then put them out on the curb for pickup day. No one showed, they remain out there. So we call the garbage folks on our bill, and they can find no record of our house. I ask “Well, if I stop paying my bill, who will call me?” They say, “You must be covered by our contractor” and transfer the call. Company two says, nope. We have no record of your house having an account. Call company number three. So we do. Company three says that they aren’t servicing our neighborhood. So back to the number on our bill. They say that company two is definitely the one, and transfer us to Company 2’s manager. Voice mail, leave a message. Total time on phone: 75 minutes.

You guessed it. No call back. So we call again the next day and play phone tag for another hour, getting nowhere. I snap a picture of the garbage truck while it was picking up our garbage, and it has the name of Company 2 on the side in foot tall letters. So we call them.

Company 2 drone: “Sure, I can place an order to get your bulk items. What is your address and the name of your neighborhood?” We give them, and she says: “That neighborhood isn’t in our reporting system. Do you have the correct name?”

We reply, “That is the only name. We have lived here for 15 years, and we are sure that’s the name.”

Drone: “Well, that one isn’t in the system, and I can’t put in the work order without one. The computer has a drop down menu with neighborhood names, and unless we put it in, it won’t let us go any farther.”

Can we speak to a manager?

Drone: “I can transfer you to their voicemail, and they will call you.”

I can’t drive it to the dump myself, because the closest dump is in a different county and won’t accept out of county drop offs. I think what I am going to do is load the items up over the weekend, and dump them in front of the garbage people’s business office and let them figure out what to do with it.

Issue #3: My storage locker had been costing me $68 a month. A new company bought out the Mom and Pop that was running it, consolidated it with three other facilities, and then doubled rates. That was back in November. When February came, they raised them again. Now it’s nearly $200 a month for storage. So I spent three days emptying that 10×10 storage unit into my garage. Now I can’t park in it, and I lost my little workshop I had set up in there. That’s OK, since we are moving in less than a year, and we are getting a larger garage in the new place. I will probably build a storage barn in the back of the new place. I can get a 10×16 that looks like the one below for about $4,900, delivered.

When I went in to tell them that I had moved out, I noticed that the security cameras were no longer hooked up, and I had noticed that the electric gate securing the property has been disconnected. So this place was bought out by a large company, the on site managers are gone, the security gate is gone, and the security cameras no longer work. And rates are now 285% higher than they were just four months ago. What the hell are those higher rates paying for? Don’t know, don’t care. I vacated the place.