Harbingers of doom; I usually don't talk about my work much, in the political sense. But I'm really pissed. And today, my supervisor got an ear full, and I'm sure that the director heard about it. At issue is the OT change that I mentioned yesterday, but there's a lot of other stuff there too. For one thing, I found out that every other department has down-time scheduled over the lunch hour. Not us. Grab a sandwich (but you can't eat it in the department!) and run run run. And I found out that, well, we just hadn't been getting information that affected us directly. The information that we get is filtered through other departments and passed on to us as rumors. Our supervisor doesn't have enough respect for us to let us know what's going on. Yes, there is a revolution brewing. I seldom get my back up, and it is seriously up now. Our core group has over 100 years (and that's just three of us!) working for St. Francis. We've built an excellent department, and we've put a lot of work into improving patient care and general efficiency. We are *damned* good at what we do. And we get absolutely *no* respect for that. Nope. None. They (administration) will push us just as hard as they can. Other departments, when they have vacations, time off for other reasons, they get their schedules dented. We don't. We're expected to do just as much work with three techs as we are with four. In the real world, you just know that don't work, not without major sacrifices. The sacrifices are our bodies. Administration doesn't live in the real world. Our director, he's a lab guy. He knows shit about radiology. And our supervisor, he just wants to get along, he never wanted to be a supervisor anyway. He is certainly not going to bat for us, he could care less. And me? I'm getting tired of being driven with whips and feeble goads to get the job done. One of those goads was money. Weekends on call were how we made the money. Sacrificing our time off, sacrificing our bodies, punished with 59 hours of straight work. We did that, because it was a necessity, both for the hospital and for our personal finances. Every time that we clocked in over the weekend, we followed their rules: Clock in, do the patients that needed to be done, clock out. We were paid travel time (0.5 hours) and a minimum of one hour. So we got time-and-a-half for a single patient in the middle of the night. And, if we happened to get called in again five minutes after we'd left the hospital, we might once again get that one-and-a-half hours at time-and-a-half. Nobody was abusing the system. But.... Suddenly, the system wasn't working for our manager. Too much overtime. Not "Too much work" or "Too many patients". Nope. Too much OT. And our time, even paid for at 1.5X, is but a fraction of what the hospital charges for the exams. Yeah, they don't get all of that money, but that's not our concern, we did our part of the deal. But, but... the manager gets his bonus based on how close he comes to the numbers! And, to further complicate matters, several long-time people in the hospital have been fired for various reasons. One of those reasons, I think, was to make everyone think. OK, enough of that. Didn't get much sleep last night, practically none, in fact. And it wasn't because of the thunderstorms, either, although I was awakened at 04:00 by one passing through. Nope, it was because of my head. This work thing has been eating on me for a while, and I'm glad to get it out in the open, more or less. Maybe I'll sleep better. No progress on the shop today, dammit. And now, I feel like playing some music and going to bed early.
Peremptory dismissals, adherence
to the bottom line.