Scorpio

Being a Scorpio, and knowing many of them, I can say this with confidence: Scorpios can be cunts. It’s in our bones, its woven into our DNA. Scorpios can be vindictive, they can be petty, and when they are hurting, they do their best to make sure others hurt just as bad as they are hurting. Scorpios are saboteurs, they are stubborn and most of all they don’t EVER think they are wrong. Scorpio’s are decisive and unwavering, black and white in their thinking, and forgiveness is a word in pretty low rotation in the Scorpio vocabulary. Scorpios are fabulous at building walls, but if breaking down walls was part of a school report card it would definitely say ‘more effort required’. As a general rule, Scorpios are pedal to the metal, full speed ahead. If we have any faults, and we don’t, it would be our inability to slow down when feeling righteous.

The humbling part of this story, and the lesson I have since learned, was that I was wrong about both KRONOS and Hermes Labs. I still maintain that they are both utterly and completely fucking useless in managing staff, but then I guess if you look closely enough, what company isn't? Each part of the hierarchy is populated by fallible humans, all fighting to hang on to their power. They say people rise to their level of incompetence. Basically, you stop being promoted once you prove yourself incompetent, so by default, a manager will be incompetent otherwise they would have been promoted further.

KRONOS worked on a system of, ‘We are watching you, and if you screw up you WILL get caught’. It encouraged dobbing, and back stabbing, and because they were sadistic fuckers, they would change the rules on a whim so no matter what you did you were going to be in the wrong at some point because someone changed the rules and never told you. You were constantly watched, by other staff and by the supervisors. You were under scrutiny from the trainers, the lab, data entry, at every level from start to finish. From the first patient contact until the lab results were received by the doctor. If something went wrong at any point, you better bet that shit rolled down hill straight back to you. The lab lost the blood, must be the collector’s fault. The results took longer than the Doctor would have liked, the collector’s fault.

Hermes labs were the polar opposite. I don’t think they could even tell you who was working at any given time, let alone who did what. They treated it more like an Easter egg hunt, give each staff member a basket and see who could collect the most Easter eggs, no questions asked. You could buy those eggs from a supermarket, or punch a small child and steal their eggs, they didn’t care. All that mattered was who had the fullest basket at the end of the day. Obviously that kind of attitude won’t work under close supervision, they can’t claim ignorance of unethical practices (that they encourage) if they are watching it happen. So, they whisper in your ear ‘Do whatever it takes’) then turn a blind eye while you push over a child, then pat you on the back and sneak you a wink when you return with the candy you literally stole from a baby.

It was like the juxtaposition of all juxtapositions. Like red wine to white, or vagina to penis - though I guess one of those goes in the other (editor’s note: indeed, it does in hetero situations my innocent gay flower), scrap that, it’s like self-raising flour and plain flour, both useful but both for very different recipes. Anyway, my editor will fix up those comparisons for me. I know none of them really make sense, but she always knows what I mean and translates it to regular people speak for me. (Not this time my precious poesy. Your readers deserve a small glimpse at what I have to work with. That said, this is an actual line from a published book that sold millions of copies: Arvo laughed. “Ha ha ha’ he giggled. Stephanie Meyer. New Moon. See, bestselling Authors can write any old shit so long as there is sex stuff. We have that side covered poppet. Your book will be a runaway smash hit).

So here you had two, major pathology companies, running the metaphorical race not dissimilar to an election campaign. Lots of dirt flinging, empty promises, and picking a stand on an issue based on it being in opposition to your competitions stand regardless of whether it makes sense or not. For those of you not working in health or pathology, I hate to break it to you, these companies do not give a fuck about your health, just your sweet sweet mullah. What they both have in common though, is their tendency to hire incompetent managers.

On the KRONOS side you had David. A short haired, menthol smoking terrier. The sort of woman who would return a $2.50 toilet brush after she had used it, just because she could. On the Hermes Labs side, you had Sharon. A woman who had reinvented herself mid-life, post-divorce, as a rather aggressive lesbian determined to immerse herself in all things anti-heterosexual. Before her divorce she was a semi-stay-at home mother/ trophy wife to a jeweller. Post-divorce, she resented her children for preventing her from living her best lesbian life.

Life under the microscope, under the unblinking eye of David had its ups and downs. In my more generous moments, I can admit that you always knew she genuinely cared about the patient experience, and genuinely cared about maintaining standards. But she took it too far, no-one can function under that level of scrutiny without developing a stress induced aneurysm. The level of scrutiny only increased with the introduction of e-collect. An electronic tracking system. This story, however, isn't about David, her mistakes, and the people she ruined along the way. It’s about Sharon. I mention David only to draw attention to the sheer contrast between her and Sharon.

When you start a new job, having previously worked with your new manager, you think you know what to expect. I had worked with Sharon and had never formed any negative opinions about her work ethic or capabilities as a phlebotomist. I knew her as a single mum, working hard to support her three kids. Yes, she was late occasionally, but who isn’t. Yes, she slacked off occasionally but who doesn't. The thing is, I didn’t work with her regularly enough to know it wasn’t just occasionally, late and lazy was her default setting. Not to resort to racist stereotypes but she was a White South African, and they do tend to be whining, entitled mother fuckers, prone to tantrums when things don’t go their way. I guess we bonded because I didn’t really know her at all, I simply took her at her own self inflated estimation. After Sharon had left her husband, and decided to go dyke, I tried to take her under my wing a bit.

Sharon is pretty in the default way all skinny blonde women are. Even when they are not pretty, they are still skinny and blonde so automatically a 6. Sharon has a Jewish nose, so she’s only a 6, but at the end of the day she’s still a 6. She’s also a chain smoker. When Sharon got the job managing pathology collection at the new Hospital, I had no reason to think she wouldn’t be the excellent manager she promised to be. Her attitude was on point, she radiated excitement, but it turned out she’s all talk.

Sharon’s attitude towards leave was refreshing. She always says yes to any leave request and sick days were not a problem. Even when staff left her for a higher paying job in the Hospital, she seemed happy for them. The flip side of that is that you might turn up at work to find she has given half the staff time off but never bothered to replace them. You find yourself trying to do the job of two or even three people. Sure, it’s nice to be able to take a last-minute three-week trip to London, but it sucks to be trying to do two people’s jobs for three weeks whilst someone else is living it up in London. Sharon never left her office to actually help with anything lowly like collecting blood. When she wasn’t hanging out in the back-dock chain smoking, she was staring listlessly at the computer, checking her Facebook and pretending to work. She was repeatedly told by security that the grounds were non-smoking and she couldn’t smoke there, but she repeatedly ignored them and continued to treat the docks like her own private cigar club. She should just put a leather recliner and a fancy ashtray in the docks and quite the charade. She’s there more than her office, fucks sake girl just own your shit. Much like the nepotism that frustrated me at KRONOS, Sharon gets away with it because the area manager loves her. Sharon the lesbian, shows off their #diversity. Never underestimate how far tokenism can take a person in these #woke times.

Everyone is trying to stand out, but instead of trying to stand out for being good at what you do, they focus on lip service. Hermes Labs wants to expand into Uber blood. Basically, it lets doctors log onto an app so they can see where the bloods are at and when they will arrive on base to be processed. No doctor gives a fuck about where the blood is at, they want the fucking results. They are not sitting there constantly refreshing the app, ‘OOOH its now on the third floor’ ‘By gosh, that FBC I ordered is now almost at the second floor. Damn it Doris this is more exciting than the New Avengers movie’. Hermes labs are even investigating the possibility of doing drone deliveries. Fuck sake, the only people who would be impressed by that are teenager boys and hypochondriacs who want their online results so they can convince themselves they have cancer or a rare autoimmune disease. Here’s a novel idea, how about you build your reputation for doing the job of collecting and testing pathology samples really quickly, accurately and efficiently. No bullshit drones or apps or any other technology designed to distract from the fact you are not all that great at your core business-pathology.

To be honest, it was a bad time for Sharon to be promoted to anything. She was getting married in 6 months and her partner was going to have major heart surgery. The leap from pathology collector working in a single collector room in a doctor’s office to managing 40 staff in a new Hospital that didn’t have strong community backing would have tested even the strongest of people. Sharon obviously thought she had what it took, and could manage her work/life balance, so why shouldn't she be given the opportunity? The first week at the hospital quickly proved that Sharon did not and would never have what it took to do the job.

Working 12 hr days 5 days a week proved too much for her. Within a week she had let the staff know she was near breakdown and it would be up to us to run the show. The first week was always going to be hard, I don’t know why she thought it wouldn’t. But it took her by surprise and she fell at the first hurdle. If she was a horse, you would conclude that she just wasn’t a showjumper and would send her to a riding school or somewhere that better suited her strengths. Instead Hermes Labs lowered the jumps, time and time again, but she still failed to ever clear a jump. Instead, the collectors had to pick up the slack. And boy did we do it well. We soon had the Hospital pathology running smoothly, and like shit managers everywhere Sharon swooped in a took all the credit. We were doing our jobs, and between us doing 90% of her job too, but she swooped in for the glory and shat all over us. She became everything she always bitched about at KRONOS. A lazy, credit hogging, management speak sham. Most people in the Hospital didn’t even know Sharon was the manager, and no-one could tell you what she actually did besides smoking on the loading dock. It’s kind of funny, at the time we were not angry at her lack of management skills, we just wanted her to have our backs. Many of us had come from KRONOS and were still giddy with the independence she gave us and we were delighted when she would over-pay us because she couldn’t keep track of the roster. In time we started to see Sharon’s management as a joke rather than anything. A really bad joke where you just had to laugh or you would cry. We started to realise she was an incompetent twit, and the shit was going to run downhill if something went wrong. It was one of those stop you dead in your track moments, the day I realised that we were managing our manger and doing her job, because if we didn’t it would all fall apart in a bad way. She was big on empty management speak. She had obviously watched too many motivational videos. Half way out the door for her next cigarette she would toss random ditties like “smash it out of the park team’ or ‘Just take your time and communicate’. My personal favorited was “hey guys, we have two off sick today, you'll manage fine, just take your time and communicate”. ‘Communicate’ became her catch-cry. Communicate what and to whom? Sharon made a point of being unavailable both in person and on the phone. Who were we meant to be communicating with? She wasn’t communicating clearly with us about what our actual job entailed, just vague ‘You will be fine, smash it out of the park guys’ and ‘You will work it out’. Some people speak a lot, while never really saying anything at all. Sharon was one of those people. All her talk of team work, communicating, and building each other up, was empty bullshit.