Me

This new hospital is a much different environment from the old one. The first several weeks are spent learning every policy and procedure that the hospital has- and they have policies and procedures for everything from pregnancy testing to inserting foley catheters. They want things done a certain way, and they spend quite a bit of time making sure that you know what that way is. I am busy doing online training while I am at home- they pay you an extra 4 hours a week for doing it. So you work your three 12 hour shifts, do your online training, and get paid for 40 hours.

The ED is about twice the size from the old one, with three times the staff. It’s more organized, better managed, and the employees seem happier. On my first day, they presented me with a welcome card that was signed by dozens of the nurses working there.

It will take me a few months to get fully up to speed, but things are much better than they were at the old hospital.

I was awakened this morning at 5 am by a text message from the charge nurse at my now former job. He wanted to let me know that they were calling me off for my scheduled shift today. I responded that I already knew that, as they had told me last week that I was no longer on the schedule. I respect this nurse and he wasn’t part of the decision to let me go, so no hard feelings.

Then I got another text message from management at 9am that reads:

We removed you from the schedule for the rest of this week. Good luck to you in your new job. Our loss is their gain. Please return your ID badges at your convenience.

I haven’t worked there for 3 weeks. That means I have already received my last paycheck. There is no reason for me to go back there to return my IDs, and it is therefore not convenient to me.

I am still on the text messaging group that my (now former) job uses to communicate with employees. I just got a text message that all employees need to attend a mandatory training session on Tuesday the 23rd so they can be trained on the new Philips cardiac monitoring system that is being installed on Wednesday the 23rd. It seems that they just spent a quarter of a million to replace 3 year old monitoring system with a new monitoring system. Now I know why they can’t afford to pay anyone.

An hour after losing my job and promising the wife that I won’t spend any money until I start getting paychecks again, I get an email from Sportsman’s Warehouse that looks like this:

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.