One response to “Work Memes: 50 Mid-Week Laughs That Beat the Slump”

1. Opal Chagrin says:

   May 22, 2025 at 5:13 pm

   This regards #42: The following occurred when I was fresh out of college & working as an RN on the 3 pm to 11:30 pm shift at the local hospital. On the hospital wing where I worked, there was a certain nurse’s aide who would do basically anything EXCEPT work. She filed her nails during the staff’s start of shift report. After report ended, she would duck into the kitchenette to microwave a bag of popcorn. She would stay in the kitchenette and munch down the entire bag. Immediately after she finished eating the popcorn, she’d walk to the hospital’s main kitchen with the excuse that she was either returning a cart full of missed lunch trays (they were leftover when patients had been off of the floor for a procedure during lunch time) or she would obtain the early dinner trays for patients who wouldn’t be in their rooms at the supper mealtime. Somehow though for her, there would just happen to be an ‘extra’ food tray. She would once again hide in the kitchenette – she’d reheat the food in the microwave and then eat all of the items from the tray. After consuming the patient’s uneaten meal, she would proceed to the nurses’ lounge for her assigned 6 pm meal break time! She used that time to sit in the recliner & chat with her two besties – nurse friends who also were on break at that time. After this aide finished her long break (she rarely came back on the floor when her 30 minutes were over), she would finally waltz into her assigned rooms and smile and greet her patients. She would then begin their bedtime routine – something normally done after 8 pm – which she combined with obtaining the vital signs for each of her patients. This* was a major NO-NO because vitals are to be taken twice per shift – typically at 4 pm and repeated again at 8 pm. I discovered she was not following proper procedure while I was the nurse in charge one weekend. A patient’s physician called, he asked for an update on his patient, he specifically wanted to hear me report the result of his 4 pm blood pressure. However, when I checked that aide’s report sheet, I saw that nothing was documented! Plus, she was nowhere to be found in order to ask her about it. Of course, I was the person who that doctor had chastised; I had to quickly get the blood pressure reading myself while the doctor was waiting on the line for me to report the current results to him. I thanked God that the BP was within normal limits; it would have been a different story (& possibly a bad outcome) if the patient’s BP had been low since his diagnosis was GI bleeding. That is the main reason this particular nurse aide’s laziness had ticked me off; it not only affected me personally, it also affected the patients under her care all because she didn’t want to properly do her job! Wanna know what was even worse? I naively reported her actions/behavior to nurse management thinking they would be concerned with providing quality patient care….instead, they did nothing to address the situation – they didn’t even have one discussion with that aide. Plus, her nurse buddies found out it was me who “narced”; they both gave me grief for reporting on her! The work atmosphere became so tense that I was no longer comfortable working on that floor with them. I ended up resigning a couple of months later
   after finding a new job at a different hospital.

   My apologies for writing a “book”… this is one memory I’ll never forget because of how much it “grated my gears”!
   Thanks to all of you who DID read this!

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