Monday's Musings

My new clogs came in the mail. I put them on the showed them to Brother, who immediately dubbed them "Ghetto Shoes". I don't care. I'm going for comfort, not style. I wore them to work, and everyone thought they were pretty outrageous. Yay for me!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was sitting at the desk, and it occurred to me that this spring will be my 15 year high school reunion. Yikes!! Has it really been that long?? I missed the 10 year because no one could find me to tell me about it. I guess I should go this time. It would make for good blog fodder...I graduated with a class of 27, in a town that had no stoplights.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This morning, I had to stay after work and participate in the competency fair. All hospitals have some sort of annual re-newel thing nurses do to show that we know what we are doing. It's long, boring, and I hate it almost as bad as onions.

If you work the night before, you are given a sticker that says something to the effect of "I worked last night, so I get to move to the front of the line." In theory, this sounds like a good thing. In practice, you may as well wear a sticker that says, "I like donkeys and 10 year old boys". At one point, a couple nurses, who had a full night of sleep under them, refused to let anymore bleary-eyed nurses move in front of them because they were bitches.

One group of stations was set up in the skills lab of the nursing school. Skills labs in nursing schools are universal. Hospital beds, dummies, various procedure trays used by nursing students to demonstrate (on the dummies) that you wipe front to back. This skills lab was bigger than the one at the school I went to, but the smell of fear hung in the air all the same. I immediately broke out into a rash upon entering.

Another set of stations was set up in a classroom. This was primarily advanced stuff that I'm really not too familiar with. One of our check-off is the defibrillator. To be honest, I've never had to actually man one in a situation that requires it. When those situations arose, the code team was usually there before you had a chance to use it. Plus, those situations are fairly uncommon. No, the only time I get to manhandle a defibrillator, is during Comp Fair and ACLS class. In the time between, I completely forget everything about the machine in a case of "use it or lose it".

So, I get to go to the check-off point with one of those nurses who thinks she's the Big Shit because she works in ICU and she saves lives, and if you don't work in ICU, then you suck. I hate nurses like this. At any rate, I'm exhausted, I'm irritable, and I really don't want to think too hard and use my . Sensing a weakened opponent, in the same manner a lion senses a gazelle with a bad leg, she decides to grill me on crap that I don't even have to know. Lucky me, a know-it-all nurse is standing behind me and joins in on the inquisition. What. The. Hell. I get flustered, my brain turns to oatmeal, and I sound like a complete moron. Big Shot ICU nurse gets this incredulous look like I'm the dumbest person on the planet and she can't believe that human lives depend on me. I just want to attach the defibrillator to her eyeballs and give her a couple jolts. I'm pretty confident that I've retained enough that I could manage that.

Three hours after I enter, I get to go home. Employee Health has a booth and they are drawing titers on all the nurses to check on what we are immune to. They only have two people working the station, the line is long, and moving slower than Jessica Simpson at a spelling bee. At this point, I surrender and decide to go home. I'm not waiting an hour just to be poked.

Comp Fair sucks.