I dealt with various staff, and various supervisory staff, in my time nursing. I worked on one particularly difficult ward, where the head nurse was very difficult to live with, or to work for. At one point she took one of the shift sheets, and marked on it all the sick days that people had taken. This indicated two things quite clearly. The first was that, yes, people were taking sick days to extend their weekends and break times. The fact that she did it also indicated why they were doing that.
It wasn't a great place to work. She wasn't a good person to work for. We tried, in small ways, to keep our own spirits up, and keep up with the work. Other factors impinged on us as well. When I had started working, there was half an hour overlap between the shifts, so that we could report to the incoming shift on the status of the patients, and any particular difficulties that they might face on their shift. However, this meant that staff were being paid for non-nursing time. The powers-that-be decided that this was a waste of money, and so created a system where the supervisor for the shift would record, on a tape recorder, the report about the patients, and that the incoming shift supervisor would listen to that report in order to determine any changes. Our hours for the shifts were reduced, accordingly, to a strict eight hour period.
I, of course, with my unfortunate sense of inappropriate humor, saw an opportunity. On one evening shift, I waited until the shift supervisor had recorded her report, and then rolled the tape back allowing myself time to create my own report, prior to hers. Using the collection of euphemisms from the Monty Python dead parrot sketch, I killed off the entire ward.
When I came on shift the next evening, the head nurse tore a strip off me. She let me know, and no uncertain terms, that nobody had found this funny, that it had upset everyone very greatly, and it was completely inappropriate to our work. I felt terrible. I had no intention of upsetting my coworkers. I felt badly all shift, and stayed on until some of this night shift workers started to show up. I went to one of the orderlies and explained that I was sorry, that I had intended it as a joke, and that I was very sorry to have upset everyone. "What are you talking about?" he asked. "We just about died laughing." Okay, that wasn't what I had been told, so I waited for the shift supervisor to come on. I explained to her that I was very sorry, that it was supposed to have been a joke, that it was I was sorry that it had not been funny.
"We absolutely howled!" she said. "When I first started listening to it, and the first person was said to have died, I was sorry about that. And then the second person? I thought that was really awful that two people died on the shift. And then there was a third! By the time you reported on the fourth person, I was beginning to understand what was happening. I called everyone in to listen to your report. We all loved it!"
Okay, I was feeling a bit better. She went on.
"We called the night float orderly. He loved it!" Okay, I could understand that: he did tend to have a sense of humor. "We called the night float nurse. She loved it!" Okay, I was a bit surprised at that. The night float nurse had never impressed me with her sense of humor. "We called Bradley!" "You didn't!" I said. "You're going to get me fired!"
I suppose I need to explain about Bradley. She was the night nursing supervisor. As far as we knew, she had had her sense of humor surgically removed. As far as we could tell Bradley never actually touched the ground when she walked, since that might make noise that would give her away. She would hover, floating soundlessly down the hallways. She *lived* to find nursing staff sleeping on the job. I wasn't kidding about the danger of being fired.
"Are you kidding?" she said. "Bradley loved it! It's the only time I have ever seen her laugh at anything!"
So, it would seem, the only person who didn't find it hilarious was that one head nurse.
As I said, when I was young, I always wanted to be a doctor. By this point, in my career, and my college career, I realized that I was never going to be able to get into medical school without an awful lot of money to go to one of the foreign schools that specialized in training people who wanted to be a doctor, but couldn't get into Canadian or American medical schools. I didn't, and never would, have that kind of money. I did enjoy working as a nurse, even in that, heavily extended care, setting. And I enjoyed taking industrial first aid training, subsequently, and working as an industrial first aid attendant.
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