Last night, I came back to my computer at my work station to see this tiny noose hanging from one of the computers. I knew immediately whodunnit, and knew that they were trying to put a comic spin on the way we are all feeling about the job lately. Laugh or cry, your choice.
We like to ask each other to "just kill me now", meaning we feel at the end of our ropes. There are as many reasons to feel despondent at work as there are to feel happy lately. You can't put a positive spin on everything. So we vent. And we say ridiculous things.
Its funny. But its also sad. Work seems very different now. We do not have the same situation as some of the other hospitals in our system - our numbers are very low. The only "crisis" happening is that we have too few patients for all of the professionals who work there. So soon, our supervisor will have to ask for volunteers to use their PTO (or agree to take no pay) and go home. Sometimes more than one employee per day, which means that all of us may average a couple of days a week.
I, like many others, know exactly how much PTO I have and that it will run out before respiratory season is in full swing. I also know how much money I must bring in for us to comfortably live and meet our obligations, including expenses for a college child. And I feel the coming pinch of the holidays, not to mention looming retirement. I need to maximize working full-time. As I told someone today, we went from being heroes to being zeros. Because that's what it feels like.
