Silver Linings Anyone? Anyone?

August 24, 2006

Can it possibly get any worse? Strike that, of course it can get worse, it just doesn't seem like it right now.

We've been waffle-stomped again! None of us even want to go to work ever again. Nothing good ever happens there. Today the manager over our department, the one that last Thursday blindsided us with the announcement that our supervisor had been fired. met with us again at shift change for a new announcement. She has found us an interim supervisor!

It is M****** A****! A stunned silence fell over our group of workers. Pat from third shift asked "You mean neuro M******?" "Why yes."

Now picture you are in this situation awaiting the announcement of a new interim supervisor and imagine if you will the person that you would least like to see as your immediate boss. That's M******. A solution to our problems that is so awful that it had never even entered our collective minds! During the week we had speculated "Oh this person would be okay or I think we could work with her and even gosh would it be horrible if it turns out to be her."

But not one of us saw this coming at all. M****** has such a bad reputation in her own department and a really poor relationship with any of us that she has ever come into contact with that we would never have considered her eligible to supervise us.

A quick review of the way she treats us. Anytime something goes wrong in the operating room, she blames us loudly and to everyone she encounters. Once she called and was yelling at me over the phone and suddenly in a much quieter voice, she says "It's okay, I know it's not your fault." Does that make it okay to tell everyone else that it is my fault? I don't think so! She is well known for withholding information or supplies so that she can produce it and everyone else looks like idiots. She tends to call and demand impossible things immediately and then hang up before we can respond. She once called me up to an OR room to talk to a surgeon about instruments that he claimed were missing from his set. The instruments were there and he still denied that they were the ones that belonged there. I pointed out the matching tape and catalog numbers. He still denied them and said he wanted every instrument set opened until his were found. All the time M****** is over to one side of the room, smirking. I left the room, took no action (because those were his instruments) and nothing more was ever said. Those instruments are in his set today.

Is it any wonder that when her number comes up on the caller id, most of my co-worker try to pass the phone off to someone else? And yet our manager seemed truely surprised at our reactions to her announcement. We stated our reservations. She reponded by saying M****** is passionate about her work. I'm sorry, but I'm passionate about my work too and if I behaved like that I would be escorted out the door!

Right now it's really hard to find the silver lining...anyone got a spare one?

Story ID:	808
Written by:	Shannon Marie Hyle (bio, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Diary/Journal Entry
Location:	Wichita Kansas USA
Year:	2006
Person:	self