Me

If you recall, I was out mowing the lawn on Sunday morning and had to use a filler post. I began mowing at around 8 am, and by the time 11 am rolled around, it was 95 degreesF outside with 60% humidity. That makes the heat index (or feels like temperature) a balmy 113 degF. That also makes the dewpoint 79 degF.

When I came in, my shirt was soaked through with sweat to the point that it was dripping water onto the floor. I have had enough with lawn mowing using a walk behind mower, especially in the summer. Something had to be made easier. I looked at Home Depot for a riding mower and was stunned to see that they cost between $3k and 5k for the cheapest ones. Holy cow. Not only that, but you have to store, maintain, and fuel the damned thing. Then you are still stuck outside using the mower to care for the grass.

Then I saw the Husqvarna Automower. Amazon had the cheapest one on sale for $699. I went a couple of models nicer, and got a model 430X. It cost a little bit less than the riding mower, but it mows the lawn for you. I temporarily placed the invisible fence wire using pegs, just so I could see how well it worked before making the install more permanent. It mows the lawn perfectly, cutting for a bit over 2 hours before returning for a recharge, then returns to finish the job. My lawn looks great, and now I don’t spend three hours a week mowing and another hour edging. All I have to do is use the edger for about an hour, and I am done. This will save me 3 hours a week during summer, and every other week during the rest of the year.

That’s more than 100 hours of leisure time a year that I won’t have to spend mowing the yard. Yeah, I know some people claim to like mowing, but I don’t, especially when it feels like 110 degreesF outside. Speaking of work, it’s now time for me to head to the salt mine to see what the idiots of my area are doing today.

Light posting today. I am under a deadline to finish an evidence based project to evaluate one of our medication administration policies. I found an error in the way that we administer and document medicine, and I have been assigned the project of reviewing the evidence and submitting it to management so that the policy can be changed.

I’m in the Bahamas on a mini vacation for the next few days.

A group of young men were seen in my neighborhood on at least three days last week. They were walking up to houses and knocking on the front doors. On the first day, if the homeowners answered, they would ask them a series of (in my opinion) intrusive questions, like how many people lived there, how much they made, how much they paid for the house, those sorts of thing. The second time they were seen, they were acting like they were selling solar systems, and when they came by yesterday, the same guys were selling home improvement supplies. Each time, the cops were called, but twice the guys were gone when the cops got here, and once the cops talked to them but they left- only to return the next day.

I was at work for the third day, and I told my wife not to open the door, and to tell them through the video doorbell that they were trespassing. She knows how to shoot, and I told her to then call the cops, and if the person tried to enter the house, to defend herself.

This is sketchy as hell. A bunch of us talk, and we have pictures of the three men involved, pictures of the two vehicles they were seen driving, and pictures of license plates. I will be keeping an eye out for those guys. Our neighbor’s husband works during weekdays, so I will keep watch over the house and wife while he is off at work.

I also pulled an outside the pants holster and mag holder out of the closet and will be wearing a larger firearm than my usual EDC whilst I am home. I will be open carrying an M&P 45, loaded with a 10 round mag filled with Speer Gold Dot G2 230grain +P hollow points while I am home (I got a great deal on a case of the GDHP last year from Lucky Gunner). Add a couple of spare mags to my belt, and I have 30 rounds of “you aren’t robbing MY fucking house without sustaining a sucking chest wound, asshole.”

Also available are shotguns, rifles, and other assorted mayhem should they give me a couple of seconds to get all of my shit in one sock.

I will keep an increased security lookout for the next few days.

Side note: The Speer G2 is a good looking load. 230 grains moving at 950 feet per second gives you 461 foot pounds of energy at close range. Expansion looks good. Check it out.

Keeping up with my current problems at work, with them requiring us to perform training on our own time but not wanting to pay us. They are saying that any training hours claimed in excess of four hours in any two week pay period will not be approved. At the same time, we are REQUIRED to complete this training, or we will be taken off of the schedule and not permitted to work.

Here is a list of the training that I have been assigned over the next few pay periods:

May 5-18

• Patient Experience Class- increasing customer satisfaction- 4 hours
• Preceptor’s monthly TEAMS meeting (preceptors are required to attend 10 of these per year) 2 hours

May 19-June 1

• Training- The Business of Healthcare, Lecture F, 4 hours
• Preceptor monthly TEAMS meeting for June, 2 hours

June 2-15

• Business of healthcare, lecture B, 4 hours
• June Skills fair, 1 hour
• Annual megacode simulation, 2 hours
• Strokes, 2024 Refresher training, 6 course series (Due 24 June) 8 hours

June 16-29

• Business of Healthcare, lecture E, 4 hours
• Preceptor workshop, 4 hours
• Quarterly HAZMAT Decon training, 4 hours

So as you can see, they are only willing to pay for four hours per two week pay period, but they assign you an average of 10 hours of training per pay period. Over the course of a year, that adds up to 240 hours of training, but they are willing pay us for less than half of it. That means I am being cheated out of about 130 hours of overtime each year, if not more. They are getting a month of free labor out of each nurse, each year. It adds up. If all of the nurses who work there are being similarly treated, and listening to the grumbling, they are, the hospital is saving almost $3 million a year by cheating the overtime rules.

I am sitting at home, taking a mandatory online training course on “preventing medication errors.” The class lasts from 0800-1200. Let’s see if I get approved to be paid for this course.

My posts are delayed this morning because I am arguing with the payroll woman at my job.

The hospital where I work has a lot of training requirements. We are assigned mandatory training every month. Some of it is in the form of traditional, in-person classes, some of it is online training, and some of it is simulation training that must be done at the hospital. We are not given time to do this while we are on our regular shift, because that time is taken up providing patient care. For the month of May, that comes to about

If we clock in (using a time clock on site, or if we clock in virtually by signing in online) to do this training at a date and time that is outside of our scheduled shift, it has to be approved. I just got a call from work and was told that some of my training hours were not approved, and I would not be getting paid for them.

The Department of Labor says that an employer doesn’t have to pay you for training time if that training meets four criteria:

• it is outside normal hours
• it is voluntary
• it is not job related, and
• no other work is concurrently performed.

We have a problem. Actually, WE don’t have a problem, my employer does. When an employer tells you that completing training is mandatory, they don’t have the option of telling you that the hours need to be approved. They have to pay you, it’s the law. Here is a handy guide for employers that explains it:

As we mentioned earlier, the FLSA requires that employees be paid at least one and a half times the regular wage rate for all hours worked over 40 in one workweek. When calculating the number of hours an employee works, you’ll need to include all compensable time, which includes unauthorized work time if you know or have reason to know about it. Essentially, if the employee works over 40 hours a week in any way, you’re liable for compensating them for it.

So, even if you have a policy in your employee handbook that states overtime must be approved by a manager in advance, if an employee works it anyway – in violation of the policy – you still must pay them. That’s because the FLSA considers “work not requested but suffered or permitted” to be work time. The reason doesn’t matter; if you know or have reason to believe the employee is continuing to work, that time is working time.

In this case, they made the training mandatory, but leave it to the employee to schedule and complete the training on their own time. The employee has to clock in and out, then has to list the hours, date, and time on a spreadsheet in the company computer system so training can verify that it was legitimate. Then after the fact, the training department “validates” the hours so that payroll can approve it. In many cases, the training people will “deny” the hours, and the employee just doesn’t get paid for completing the training.

That isn’t what the law says. I don’t have to get overtime approved if my employer knows that I am working it. They have to pay me. Period. Now they are free to fire me if I am working unauthorized overtime, but it still has to be paid.

Now many of you will say “Well, just don’t do the training, then.” If you don’t complete the training for a given month, you get removed from the schedule and are not permitted to come to work until you complete that training. That is part of how they make it mandatory. Here is an example of a required training notice, directly from an email that I received this morning:

This is a notice to help remind you that your NIH Stroke Scale Certification is due to expire in approximately 90 days. It is your responsibility to renew and provide the appropriate documentation to Human Resources in order to continue to work after 08/17/2024. In accordance with your facility’s policy, if you do not renew prior to the expiration date you may be subject to suspension and possible termination.

While we are on that topic, some of the training that they make us attend is held at another location/hospital. This requires drives that are up to an hour long to get to the other location. The law says that they have to pay you for the time spend driving to the other location. This is what the DOL has to say about that:

An employee who regularly works at a fixed location in one city is given a special one day assignment in another city and returns home the same day. The time spent in traveling to and returning from the other city is work time, except that the employer may deduct/not count that time the employee would normally spend commuting to the regular work site.

Since I have been working there, I have been told to go to another hospital for training on 12 different occasions. The total travel time for those 12 occasions is about 35 hours, and I can prove it because I keep records. It normally takes me 40 minutes round trip to get to and from work at my normal hospital, so that means that they owe me 28 hours of pay for travel time for those 12 days. That means they owe me money that is roughly equivalent to a week’s pay. So far.

I am going to see the ED department head about this the next time I am there for work. If they aren’t willing to pay me for those hours, my next step will be filing a complaint with the Florida Department of Labor’s wage and hour division. As soon as I file the complaint, they can’t fire me for working the overtime, because it then becomes unlawful retaliation.

As long as I am filing the complaint for the declined hours, I may as well include all of the travel time to the other hospitals while we are at it. If my complaint is investigated by DOL and shown to be true, the penalties can be expensive:

If you don’t pay overtime when it’s due, you have to pay back wages for the time worked. If you neglect to pay overtime properly and a complaint is filed with the DOL, you’ll pay damages, penalties, and a fine. For employers who willfully or repeatedly violate the overtime requirements, you could face a civil monetary penalty of up to $1,000 for each violation.

Now consider that there are 250 nurses who work in just the emergency department in just the one hospital where I work, with each one of those nurses being tasked with the same training requirements that I have. How many violations do you think there are? Two thousand? More? Those fines get expensive.