Nurse Follies: How to Create a Hostile Work Environment

From what I can tell, most nurses enjoy working at Acme Community Hospital (my employer). We occasionally get fed. We sometimes get free ink pens and coffee mugs. Administration will take us for walks and pat us on the head when we are good. We are routinely de-wormed, de-loused, bathed, and dropped into a nice warm flea dip twice a year (the ER nurses get this more often because they have greater exposure to the greater unwashed).

Nurses Week, they have little events to make us feel warm and fuzzy.

For Christmas, we get a gift card to a local store. Not enough to buy Christmas for your entire family, but it's enough to defray the cost of Christmas dinner. Wouldn't more be great? Sure! But with a hospital our size, one can't possibly expect them to dish out significant bonuses to all their staff. Hell, the place would go bankrupt!

So, imagine the ire when it was revealed that our hospital did in fact give out some bonuses to a small percentage of nurses. Only certain nurses, in a certain department. Not in management positions. Just regular floor schmucks like myself. To the tune of $1500 per nurse.

In these economic times, some nurses have had to be the sole breadwinners for their family because their spouses didn't end up in a profession that was recession-resilient. I'm sure those nurses would love to get a bonus like that so they can ensure that their families can have a good Christmas. But instead, you get a select few who get to take home $1500 check, while everyone else gets a $35 gift card to Bob's Food Mart.

It hardly seems fair, does it?

But can you imagine what work is going to be like after this revelation? How would you feel if you were the gift card recipient working with the tool who doesn't do anything more special than you do? Or how would you like to be the bonus recipient, working amongst your angry coworkers who would like to see you fall down an elevator shaft??

This should be as well-received as a five year old fruitcake.