I don’t know if this is common knowledge already, but if it ISN’T, I will tell you that if you find a mysterious pill, say under the bed in your teenager’s room, you can search online for the numbers/letters printed on the side of the pill and find out that it’s a perfectly unexciting prescription he took a decade ago for summer camp, and maybe you should vacuum under the bed more often.
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I finally got out of bed tonight after lying there for an hour and a half fretting pointlessly. The fretting is miscellaneously useless (the landlord who unfairly kept our security deposit 20 years ago; the phone call I need to make; the cleaning I should do for an upcoming get-together; politics), but mostly it is about work. I feel stuck. I love the client I spend the most hours with, and I feel as if I CAN’T leave her (I don’t want to / she doesn’t want me to). I feel quite bonded to the client I spend fewer hours with, and would rather not leave her. I feel as if my employer/supervisors don’t care at all what kind of job I do as long as I don’t get them in legal trouble, and that they only care about my ability to be a warm body they can plug into the schedule, and that they feel I bother them too much with the things I am SUPPOSED to bother them about.
I am gradually learning that most of the working rules are not to protect the caregivers or the clients but to protect the company, and that we are expected to break those rules. For example, someone with my level of training is ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN to do any lifting over 25 pounds, which means for example that I can assist a client with balancing or some positioning or an arm under her elbow, but I cannot haul her up out of her chair, or support her body weight. I am SPECIFICALLY INSTRUCTED to let my employer know if a client in my care needs more help/support than I am qualified to provide. And when I DO let them know? Nothing happens. Well, I shouldn’t say “nothing”: sometimes I get a snippy defensive email that makes me sorry I said anything. It’s “You absolutely cannot haul a client to her feet” combined with “We have assigned you to a client who cannot stand up unless you haul her. YOU figure out how to move her from chair to bed. Remember: NO HAULING. We value your safety / our workers’ compensation premiums!”
We are also SPECIFICALLY INSTRUCTED to let the office know if, for example, a client has certain symptoms/situations for more than three days. And so if it has been three days, I let them know. Then when I go back a week later, nothing has been done and nothing has changed. I let them know that the situation is still as it was, and I get back a prickly defensive email as if I’m trying to tell them their job. They say again and again “YOU are our eyes and ears!,” so I try to be their eyes and ears, but what they really mean is “If we get in trouble for something you should have told us, we have set it up to be YOUR FAULT.” (I keep my own copies of all these times I notify them.)
And there are certain things we are NOT ALLOWED to do, such as shoveling snow and trimming fingernails, and clients request these things fairly often, and are very surprised if I say I am not supposed to do them, because the other caregivers ARE doing them, and then I feel it looks as if I am only following the rules because those rules get me out of having to do work, when that is not at all my motivation.
There continue to be so many calls to fill shifts, even though I can TELL they are making an effort to call me WAY LESS, and I do appreciate that. There are also emails that go company-wide, and use very annoying terms such as “step up” to refer to volunteering to take additional shifts, and add annoying phrases such as “or else our clients cannot receive the care they deserve.” If we don’t have enough staff to cover shifts, more staff needs to be hired. I dislike having it implied that we are shirking our duty or neglecting our clients if we don’t take the extra hours. Shall I send the COMPANY an email asking them to “step up” and recruit/hire more staff, “or else our clients cannot receive the care they deserve”? (And if they’re finding it hard to retain staff, which they ARE, perhaps I could offer a few hints for improving employee morale.)
I feel incompatible with my bosses’ values and priorities. I feel as if I am an extremely good employee in all the ways that SHOULD matter (bonding with the clients, really truly wanting to make their lives easier and better, really truly wanting to do a good job and be a good value for their money), and that instead I am considered a mediocre employee because I am not very concerned about making my bosses’ lives easier by filling extra last-minute shifts and not bothering them with issues. And I also DO make their lives easier by showing up reliably for all my shifts and doing a good job, but that doesn’t seem to count at all: if it’s not something they have to worry about, it’s not something they give credit for.
I should say that after I had a talk with one of my supervisors, she really does seem as if she is TRYING to be considerate of the things I mentioned to her. But I think the problem is that she doesn’t understand it at all: she’s such a different temperament type, it’s like she’s trying hard to remember that a particular employee doesn’t want her to use pronouns. She’s TRYING, but she’s an extrovert, a phone person, a doesn’t-hurt-to-ask person, an everything-is-always-a-special-exceptional-emergency-without-noticing-it-happens-constantly person, a what’s-the-difference-if-you’re-working-for-Client-A-or-Client-B,-it’s-the-same-work-either-way person, an always-putting-out-fires-without-ever-working-on-fire-prevention person.
Anyway. You guys have come up with a lot of good ideas already (changing to a different company, going into private service, working for a nursing home instead, working more hours for fewer clients, thinking of this as temporary / a learning experience / good practice, etc.), so I guess this is more a status-update vent about how I’m feeling about things now. I feel as if I know my options, but that I don’t know which one I should do.
1. Stick with it. Keep doing the parts I like and find satisfying. Try to avoid/ignore the parts I don’t like and find infuriating/frustrating/upsetting. Think of all of it as good experience. Maybe get more training. Realize that ALL jobs have bad parts mixed with the good parts, and many have this very combination of satisfying work + impossible supervisors, and in fact many instead have the combination of unsatisfying work + impossible supervisors.
2. Quit. Maybe all at once, or maybe quit gradually by agreeing to go only to the clients I currently have, until they, er, no longer need care. But basically come to the conclusion that this is in many ways the right job for me, but is in more ways the wrong job for me. Start all over with the job-figuring-out process. Maybe don’t try to find something Meaningful this time (my friend Surely and I have a theory that difficult/crazy people are PARTICULARLY drawn to jobs where they can exploit people who care: teachers, caregivers, people in medical fields, people working for charitable or not-for-profit causes, etc.), and instead find something that doesn’t make me fret and stress and feel upset so much. Maybe don’t find anything at all, because so much additional stress is coming from trying to balance work with everything else.
3. Stay in the field, but make a change. I don’t think a nursing home would be more satisfying: one of my co-workers did that for two years, and says it’s mostly the parts I don’t find as satisfying, like bathing and toileting and dressing, but all in a big rush, with too many clients per caregiver. Good time flow, but depressing and sad; she said she switched to home care because she couldn’t keep saying, “I’m so sorry, I have to go” to lonely elderly people. I don’t think I want to do private care: I like being under a company’s insurance in case something goes wrong, and I like having staff nurses to consult, and I like not having to find someone to cover my shifts, and I like not having to figure out the taxes. I don’t really want to get further nursing training. That leaves changing to a different company, but I SUSPECT that the problems I’m finding at this company are pretty similar at other companies.
4. Don’t make any decisions for now. This is probably what I’m going with. Just…stick with it for now, with no real plans either way, until a plan seems clear. It’s a Job In The Hand, and that is valuable. Right now I have dropped to 8-10 hours a week, which is very little (though it’s spread over 4-5 days, so it feels as if I go to work a lot), and with only two usual clients, and this feels sustainable for now. (I could go for more hours to either of those two clients, if I wanted to; right now I don’t want to, for various reasons.) I DO like parts of it. I DO think I was going pretty crazy without a job. I DO leave my shifts feeling good, generally. I DON’T want to start over finding something new. I COULD stand more practice in not caring what employers think WHEN THEY’RE WRONG.