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Bertha

Brendon Luke

By BrendonPublished 4 years ago 12 min read
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I will never understand Bertha or what made her the poisonous harpy she is today. Today, I am a different and hopefully better man than I was yesterday. Bertha, she doesn’t seem to grow or learn from her mistakes. I’m really not sure what Bertha wants from life. Yes, Bertha is opinionated, but opinionated in the way that man hating misandryists are ‘strong’. You have to stretch the definition to breaking point and eliminate all shades of grey for opinionated to be the best word for the job. Bertha calls herself strong, opinionated and the sort of person who doesn’t take shit. All true. The Berlin wall fell quicker than you could make Bertha back down, she will force her opinions down your throat whilst threatening you with hari kiri if you don’t put in writing that her opinions are fact, and she doesn’t take shit because she has pre-emptively terrorised everyone with her our shit flinging fury. So, while what Bertha says about herself is without question correct, it is less than half the story. It's all in the delivery, and her delivery sucks. She is rude, abrupt, condescending and aggressive. The human version of the postie who takes a shit in your letterbox and carefully sandwiches it between your electricity bill and your birthday card from your nana.

It never ceases to amaze me how good people can be at manipulating others, while making you feel sorry for them at the same time. Bertha is one of those people! Somehow, she has you seeing her as a victim, but behind the scenes she is a master puppeteer, deftly pulling the strings and making her marionettes dance to her tune. If you are a decent human being (and I am) you always want to see the best in people, you want to be accommodating of their situations, but not at the expense of others. You see what they are fighting for, and you have their back, but when their fight is at the cost of others and their happiness its harder to take the high road.

If you asked Bertha, she was a better person, a higher being and basically superior to everyone else. For those of you who did philosophy at Uni and are now working off your HECS debt as baristas, it’s Neichze’s superman at work. Bertha believed she existed on a superior plane, and no doubt believed she would one day take her rightful place as the ruler and overlord of the pathetic plebs she was forced to coexist with. I sometimes wonder if Bertha believed in God, or if she believed there couldn’t possibly be an entity superior to her. There definitely won't be any dolphin reincarnations for Bertha’s soul. If Bertha liked you, Bertha liked you, but if you were one of the unfortunate ones that somehow caught Bertha’s wrath, Bertha would make your life a living hell for no reason at all, other than it suited her and she felt entitled to do so.

I started my training with KRONOS and to my dismay I was paired with Bertha. I trained on the domiciliary run or as we called it-the Dom run. Don’t get excited though, nothing S & M’ish about it unless you were working with Bertha. Dom’s did home visits. We went to people’s houses and nursing homes and collected bloods for patients that were incapable of coming into a collection room due to sickness or physical disability.

At first it was quite confronting. These people were sick or disabled, the ones who couldn’t leave their houses for a blood test. They had dementia, and severe disabilities. In the nursing homes you would see frightened old people who no longer knew who they were. You would see people in wheelchairs with feeding tubes, catheters, colostomy bags and oxygen masks battling through their days.

In time I began to love the Dom run. Bertha treated me well, and I began to gain a lot of respect for Bertha. I was trained on the Dom run for three months. Three days a week with Bertha and two days a week with Cindy. Cindy was actually really sweet, and was a great bleeder. We call good pathology collectors’ great bleeders. It’s an industry term that sounds a bit creepy when you say it to people not in the industry, but yeah, it’s a term of endearment on the job. Cindy was Napoleon’s niece, but they couldn’t have been more different. Cindy treated the patients well, and was just an all-round nice person. After Cindy left, I was given her shifts on the Dom run. I now shared the role with Bertha. All was well in the world until one day it suddenly wasn’t. One day Bertha just turned on me, I still don’t know why. But that one day, suddenly, nothing I did was good enough and everything I did was wrong.

Now, many months later, I stare at the sunset and listen to some suitably moody music, and I finally feel at ease at the situation. Don’t get me wrong, I still feel a sense of bitterness towards Bertha and should the opportunity for vengeance arise I would milk it hard. In any case, things between Bertha and I deteriorated badly and I was kicked off the Dom run. She now did the run 5 days a week and I was sent back to the collection rooms. I was sent to Mona Vale, the collection room where Bertha had an office. My supervisor at the time was clearly scared of Bertha, so despite the fact I had done nothing wrong, she took me off the Dom run to appease Bertha.

From then on Bertha treated me like absolute dirt. Even though Bertha had had me kicked off the Dom run, she bitched relentlessly about her self-inflicted additional workload. It was more than a little bit shitty that Phil placed me in the centre where Bertha had her office. I had to listen to Bertha telling people I was removed from the run for hurting patients. This absolutely wasn’t true. One day I had enough and after I again overheard Bertha bitching about me in the common area, I confronted her. I think she enjoyed the blow up, and respected me a little for it. But that was what it took for me to finally get a read on Bertha.

It was weird, before that I could never really get a read on Bertha or figure out who she was. Before the argument she seemed fake but sincere. It was hard to pinpoint if I was the crazy one or she was. She had a way of making you second guess yourself. I do wonder if she is bipolar. The standards she set for herself and everyone else were unrealistic. She set the bar so high that no one could reach it then she was angry at them for failing to meet her standards. Doing this is a stacked game, it means you get to be angry at the world for failing you, because you made the threshold too high. You get to play the victim, but when the whole world can’t meet your demands, it’s the demands that are the problem, not the whole world.

Life continued on and eventually I got promoted to another Dom run which closely overlapped Bertha’s run. We had to deal with the same doctors, a lot of the same nursing homes and we had to communicate with each other about who had done what so we didn’t double up patient collections. Because there were a lot of patients with dementia, this was pretty important. They couldn’t tell us if someone had already taken their bloods, so we had to communicate with each other a fair bit.

The new Dom run was my pride and joy, I was happy going to work. How many people can say they are actually happy to wake up and go to work? At the time I was 27, for 27 years that hadn’t happened, until now.

I was a few weeks in to my new Dom run when I was rung by our new supervisor, David Brent. David Brent politely said not to ask questions, and asked me whether or not I would be able to cover Bertha’s run for next few days. She said that Bertha would be covering my Dom run. At this point David Brent and I hadn't had much interaction, she had been my supervisor for just two weeks. I agreed to her request.

After two days of Bertha and I doing each other's Dom runs, I asked David Brent for a meeting to discuss what was happening. I had heard nothing more about how long this would be happening for and wanted to know where I stood. I was then brought into David Brent’s office and told that the swap would be permanent and was effective immediately. No questions could be asked and for confidentiality reasons I was not entitled to know why the swap was made. Bertha would now be doing my Dom run, and I Bertha’s. End of story.

The KRONOS code of conducts policy, however states that any staff member that is requested to move from a permanent position, (both Bertha and I had full time contracts) would be allowed two weeks overlapping time in their position to allow the transition to proceed with ease. David Brent offered no transition time. Bertha and I were pissed. I now know that this was all part of Bertha’s plan, and David Brent fell into Bertha’s trap just like I had. But at the time, I was just standing in David Brents office being reprimanded and told to mind my own business, bend over and take it. This was when I first realised that David Brent put KRONOS over everything, even fairness. If she had asked me to consider the job swap, I would have. If she had presented it to me as a choice, explained why it was happening, and followed the 2 weeks grace policy, it would have been a different matter. Instead she basically said bend over boy and metaphorically shafted me.

Two weeks into the swap I had multiple ex patients calling up to complain about Bertha. They were complaining that she was rough, rude and aggressive. I saw multiple written Feedback forms complaining about her too. I had my pride and joy Dom run taken from me with no explanation. I was forced to swap it for a Dom run I did not want, and made to work out of a collection room I did not want to work out of. After two years of loyalty and diligence, KRONOS had tossed me aside. Management had sacrificed me rather than dealing with the Bertha crisis. Bertha had manipulated and bullied pretty much everyone on The Beaches, but I was the one who was punished. I have no doubt long after this book is finished, Bertha will still be employed by KRONOS. I refuse to work for a company that treats its loyal staff so shabbily, and rewards the bullies because they are too bloody scared to do anything about their bullying.

For a brief time when Bertha and I shared an office in Mona vale, we had a lovely receptionist called Sue. Sue was genuine, nice and caring. Sue was 50, and lived with her mother. Sues mother had dementia. Sue had never married or had kids, and she was now her mother’s carer. Bertha took an instant dislike to Sue and proceeded to make her life hell, just for the fun of it. Bertha would call Sue ‘that fat piece of shit’ or ‘that retarded lard’ Bertha would complain that ‘Lardo can’t even take a phone message correctly’. Bertha’s office was next to the reception, and she has a voice that could double as a fog horn. There is absolutely no doubt that Sue heard what Bertha spoke about her, and absolutely no doubt Bertha wanted her to hear it. How would you feel if someone said stuff like that about you? To make it worse, Bertha had two young daughters but still saw nothing wrong with running a hateful bullying campaign against another person.

One day Sue had had enough and decided to stand up against Bertha. The campaign of unfair hate had finally become too much. Sue asked for people to stand up and back her up with formal complaints. She wanted them to help her build a case against Bertha for bullying and harassment. Sue asked everyone to document the times they had heard or witnessed Bertha bullying her. Bertha was the most hated person on The Beaches, but she was also the most feared. She was friends with Tammy, she was also friends with Napoleon. Bertha was untouchable. We get paid a measly $20.90 per hour and people are supporting their families off this. In fear of retribution, staff were too scared to back Sue up formally. This is why Bertha got away with it, people were too scared to confront her because she had people with power in her pocket. In total 3 staff out of 80 were prepared to support Sue. They were happy to take on Bertha and her bullying, despite knowing that the company would not support them in the end. Those 3 people were me, Buddy and Janet. We were the only ones with the courage to stand up for what is right.

Another example of Bertha’s cruelty, Bertha did a heel prick on a baby. Heel pricks can get quite messy and intense, and the parents are always worried about their sick newborn who needs a blood test and medical intervention before they can hold their own head up. Bertha treated these two parents like shit. The baby didn't have a Medicare card yet, because der, it was less than a week old, and Medicare is a government department. If you are lucky, they will update the card before the kid can drive and vote. The baby was sick and needed tests urgently. Bertha refused to do the test until they paid upfront. She said the testing would not be covered by Medicare, if no current number and card could be presented for the child, even if they were Australian residents. This is utter crap, children are automatically covered under their parents’ card, as long as the parents had updated the card online, which they had done.

They were just waiting for the new card to be posted to them, all Bertha had to do was use her common sense and be a decent human being. She could have written the information on the referral, or let them know that they will receive an invoice in the mail from accounts and once they have had their child’s card issued, they could ring up our accounts department and have it voided. April, who was also working that day explained all of this to the parents. After work, Bertha then abused and assaulted April while she was walking to her car. Bertha was unhappy that April had shown empathy and been helpful towards these anxious parents with their sick newborn baby. Like I said, Bertha’s way or its the highway, and don’t you dare contradict her or she will assault you in a dark carpark.

humanity
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