Blessings
There are things in my life that are not so good right now which a few weeks ago, I thought would be stellar. I changed jobs and it isn't working out well for me. However, I am being protected and I feel that. My orientation was a disaster as I had to go into an office daily and try to be on time for work. My depression and other lifestyle issues impeded my success in that regard and I managed to piss off my boss royally, who happens to be a friend and my former supervisor at the company I just left, to the point of her almost firing me the other day after only being on the job a month and after her recruiting me away from our old company in which the work culture for me or her was no longer a good fit and in which I was beginning to fail. My new position with our new company currently is to be the after hours RN for a local hospice organization which means I get full pay to sit up all night with a phone by my side should the organization's triage center not be able to handle a patient situation via telephone. I work 12 hours from 8p to 8a Wed night through Sunday morning (good-bye, weekends), eight of which I get paid a guaranteed hourly rate. If I am called out after that, I get time and a half. Sounds good, doesn't it? Except somehow I managed to ask practice questions which brought to light some of the deficiencies in how most of the team was practicing nursing. My boss is only 3 month into this job herself and prior to that, there wasn't very strong leadership. When nurses are left to their own devices without strong guidance, they will go rogue and start cutting corners in order to get the most done in the shortest amount of time. This team has done that along with developing really inappropriate boundaries with some of their patient population. Because my boss is in the office and these are veteran nurses that know how to cover their tracks so that their patients stay ignorant and happy, she is not seeing the ways in which they are deficient. Then along comes me asking these practice questions in what was perceived as a very disruptive way as no one had clear answers and which revealed the vast disorganization and inconsistencies of their individual practice modalities. It has put my boss in a very awkward position as the staff is aware that she was my former supervisor at my other job. In my defense, I was just trying to learn their way of being and contrasting it with what I knew to be standard practice in my experience. Couple that with my being consistently 5 to 10 minutes late to a very loosely scheduled orientation process in which I really had no idea what to expect one day to the next and in which I had to ask for certain learning experiences because my boss is swamped trying to simultaneously fix things that need to be fix and maintain daily processes, and one might imagine that I did not set myself up to be 'Miss Popular'. And so, the hammer came down as the team started to complain that I was a 'know-it-all' and my boss felt as if I had taken advantage of our previous relationship. My only saving grace is that my regular schedule of working nights at home started last night and prior to hiring me, my boss agreed to give me a week off without pay, which starts in 48hrs, so that I could go to Atlanta and close out my 11 year old storage unit. Therefore, my blessing is 'out of sight/out of mind' in this regard. Last night- no calls. Tonight it is midnight and no calls as of yet. I am prepared to go out on call. When I return from Atlanta, if I still have a job, I will also be doing essentially what amounts to chart audits along with taking any response visits but until that time, the irony does not escape me that I am being paid nearly 50 dollars an hour to sit around my house and fold my socks. Seeing the shape of things to come, I reached out to other nursing colleagues and I actually have another interview tomorrow at noon. Things for now are very precarious but just for today, I am folding socks, packing for my trip to Atlanta and getting paid handsomely to do so. Blessings, I tell you. Blessings.