We hired a part-time girl at the clinic a few months ago who…well, the kindest thing I can say about her is that her personality, priorities, and work ethic don’t mesh well with the rest of the staff. The most accurate thing I can say about her is the entry I wrote in my livejournal, entitled “I hate her. I hate her a lot.” I dislike her as a human being, and I really, really hate her as a coworker.
Why do I hate her? Well, I hate anybody who’s willing to sit on their ass and watch other people bust theirs. That’s really the bulk of the problem people have with her; she’s bone idle lazy. Every other tech in the building can be running like hell, and she’ll be sitting there eating Pop-tarts unless someone actually tells her to do something specific. By the time I can bite my tongue over the urge to tell her to get her thumb out of her ass and come do something, ask her politely, wait for her to dawdle along with it, and discreetly check to make sure it’s done right, I could have already done it myself a couple of times, and I’d know it was done right.
There are other issues, too, such as her not being very reliable, never finishing what she starts, horning in on other people’s cases when the patient is cute and fluffy and not terribly sick but mysteriously disappearing when some disgusting trainwreck rolls in, and always wanting to leave early when there’s work to be done. I think that for the most part, though, those are all just facets of the laziness issue.
All that’s really neither here nor there, though. The upshot of it all is that she’s at the end of her probationary period, and they’d decided to let her go. They were going to let her finish out the month, give her some time to look for another job, etc. Apparently, the doc who does all the performance reviews got as far as it doesn’t seem like a good fit and it’s just not working out when things got hairy. She started bawling, and arguing about how good a job she was doing, and begging them not to fire her.
I find this sort of behavior jaw-dropping for a lot of reasons, really. First and foremost, while I can understand the urge to cry in such a situation, the idea of humiliating myself by giving in to that urge is simply horrifying to me. It’s just…so undignified. It also boggles my mind that anyone could possibly think she’s a good tech. She can pull blood and restrain, yes, but she still can’t reliably put an IV into a 100# dog with good veins and good blood pressure. She hasn’t learned how to take radiographs on her own, or set up for procedures, or hook up basic monitoring equipment, or a dozen other things we need to be able to do. Last but certainly not least, I simply cannot imagine begging for the privelege of working somewhere where they quite obviously don’t want you.