work rant (but maybe a little breakthrough)

Things I’ve been figuring out, as the one employee at my workplace who has a code of ethics towards the patients, as well as being also the one employee who doesn’t want to make small talk socially with colleagues.

There is a thing that happens to people in this situation, which up to now I felt I could only stew in silence about.

Namely: the thing where your coworkers are having some inane conversation about their kids, their in-laws, their vacation, or worst of all their politics (especially when it’s right-wing, with a heavy side of racism and classism towards the last patient they had to deal with)

And, as always with non-work-related talk, this is taking their focus away from working.

And so, currently, you are the only one doing any actual work (filling a prescription, entering data, organizing a shelf)

And then a patient comes to the front counter.

And the patient looks at you.

And you look at your coworkers, who are still chatting up a storm and pretending the patient doesn’t exist. And there is no way they didn’t notice the door opening. 

And…. time passes.

Yeah, it’s a few seconds, but to you it feels like forever. Because it is a stretch of time in which your coworkers are intentionally choosing to ignore both 1. an actual patient needing help and 2. their only coworker who is actually working, in favor of whatever is so damn scintillating about their little small-talk session with each other.

And there’s no way around it – they are clearly just expecting that you – again, the only person already doing work-- are going to move that work onto a back burner, and go pick up the more urgent work of helping a guest in person, just so they can… go on being neurotypically social and acting like they don’t have a job.

And at this point, when they’ve made this clear to you, it’s tempting to think you have no other option than just…. to do what they expect. 

Because, if you call them out for being lazy, they’ll see that as a personal attack. And there is no way your working relationship (strained as it is) could survive that without some damage. And, as much as that relationship sucks, you need it to stay functional in order to keep making a living, and you need it not to get even worse.

And, it’s not like calling them out would even change their behavior, anyway. Because, if there was any hope of reasoning with them– if they were at all capable of understanding why they need to act differently– then there’s no possible way they would be acting like this in the first place.

Right?

Well, actually… not quite.

Sometimes, all that’s needed is a few seconds.

And yes, a few seconds can feel like forever. And for someone who cares about helping people at your level of urgency, it hurts to say “we’ll be with you in a moment!” and then just… stand there and continue working on something else.

But sometimes? in those few seconds? sometimes, the deadbeat coworkers will actually realize that you are leaving the ball in their court, and that they actually gotta do something about it.

Sometimes, it’s just that your threshold of “how many seconds it’s okay to keep someone waiting” was a little lower than theirs.

And yes, that may still be because you care more and they care less.

But maybe the difference isn’t as huge as it feels.

But yes, it’s still unfair.

In a way, it’s the same kind of unfairness as a household where the responsibility for cleanup is always on the first person who notices a mess– meaning, in practice, that the person with the lowest threshold for “what counts as a mess” ends up having to do all the cleaning. 

And the only solution,  sometimes, is for that person to just suck up the discomfort of living in a mess, and work on raising their threshold a little bit– until someone else is forced to notice the mess and deal with it.

…Just kind of sucks that the mess, in this case, is real people’s healthcare.