Nurse recruiter

Well today was one of those days I’d have given away except I couldn’t find anyone gullible enough to take it.

The most positive part of the day was that I spoke to a recruiter from Labrador who offered me a job on the spot. All kinds of benefits from relocation coverage to temporary free accommodation, northern allowance etc. but….the signing bonus was less than locally and the wages were equal to what I make now. So until there is some kind of re-evaluation up there it’s just not worth the upheaval. But I told her to keep me on the future possibilities list if something comes up. If I’m going to change jobs I’m not interested in doing a new one at my age but I’ve done enough in my career I can just revisit one.

I had several high intensity encounters before 10 a.m. with strong willed individuals attempting to strong arm me into doing jobs they don’t want to do themselves. “Not going to happen” and”you’re making me really annoyed” was as civil as the reply got and at one point I just walked away.

I had an ‘incident’ at about 9 a.m. where I was opening something online – not sure if it was an email attachment or a website (the trouble with multitasking is that it’s difficult to pin down what you were doing) and the network security system picked up a Trojan horse virus which had embedded itself in my temporary files. Or so the tech told me when I had to call the help desk after being unable to access the web browser, getting a lot of very disturbing warnings and rebooting two or three times. It required the tech to ‘take over’ my computer remotely which is always a very poltergeist type of feeling so I went to lunch while being possessed. In the afternoon when I tried to access the electronic health records function there was another panic as it appeared the Trojan horse had eaten Meditech which had disappeared off my desktop. After following tech instructions to reboot yet again I was finally sorted out.

And the ‘going to lunch’ was highly over rated as by the time I made my way down to the fundraising BBQ….there was nothing left and they were washing the salad bowls. I had however had a nice scone in the morning (surreptitiously obtained) while the Nurse Manager and I were enduring a 90 minute conference call with the district facility in her office. After suffering through a completely irrelevant to us discussions on lost OR instruments – just to fill you in we lost our OR locally about 15 years ago in a government reorganization – an item on the agenda was referred to as “infection control isn’t here today” to which I attempted to raise awareness of my presence by speaking firmly into the phone microphone and saying “hello, hello, anyone there?” and then “I do infection control remember?” until I finally made myself known. Nothing like feeling useful, for sure.

Anyway, enough snarling, this is the time I’m NOT working so why should I whine about it? Hard to reason with an employer who will spend an additional $10,000 in the next six weeks to mandate overtime for RNs (ordering them in to work and paying 1.5 to 2.8 times wages depending on the situation while ticking everyone off and lowering morale and productivity) to meet core staffing needs as we are five full time positions short at present but there is no recruitment and retention plan in place.


Well, actually another positive of today was a request for a lecturer for reduced fees on a Baltic cruise wasn’t too bad but the timing (read financial situation and vacation bank) didn’t agree although the itinerary sure does:

London (Dover), England
Le Havre, France
Zeebrugge, Belgium
Amsterdam
Day at Sea
Copenhagen, Denmark
Day at Sea
Helsinki, Finland
St. Petersburg, Russia
Tallinn, Estonia
Stockholm, Sweden

And speaking of Sweden, the youngest member of the family is attempting to get herself underway in that direction, leaving in just nine days. Let me just say this about her efforts - I have taken exception to her line in her summer job application letters explaining her organizational skills!