I've been thinking about posting here for a while but the amount of shit I went through there is difficult to organize in a cohesive way without sounding like I'm going off on some rabid rant. I guess the best place to start is at the beginning. THIS WILL BE A LONG ONE
I was hired on there during the lockdown in 2020, I had just been let go from my previous job of three years cooking at a bar. I remember one of the owners was nail-biting over whether or not Indiana would go on lockdown as the other states around us did and after a bit, some of us had to be let go. Anyways, I was given a tip about a nursing home super close to where I live to be in need of kitchen staff. I applied and got an interview. That's when the bullshit started.
I was offered a position as a cook starting at 13/hr. Fantastic, I accepted. I was told there would be a slew of benefits, such as free health insurance benefits for starters (if you got the basic package and passed a nicotine test), access to *free* online schooling with Purdue Global (for select degrees), a free four-star chef program, etc. Literally, none of that proved to be valid.
Instead, I worked as a Dietary Aide for a year and a half starting off a dollar less than what I was promised. They changed how the health insurance worked without saying a word to anyone so it in fact did not end up being free, the online schooling thing just wasn't working for some reason, and there was no clear way to begin the chef program. Womp womp. I regularly asked about when I would begin working the position I was hired to do and was regularly told 'soon, soon' only for that to never happen.
As if that wasn't bad enough, let's get into the grittier stuff. I started off actually being kind of proud to work there, I felt like I was actually helping people. It wasn't a hard gig and there was some emotional reward to it. That didn't last for long. Being consistently lied to by my old boss about the job I was hired to do didn't help, I figured out pretty quickly it was so she could give the position to her friend. During the winter of 2020/2021, when things got really nasty before the vaccine was available, we had a really, really bad outbreak. At one point a quarter of the kitchen staff was out with covid, I can't speak for the other departments but everywhere was struggling. The initial response was atrocious. I remember when we got our first positive resident, all of the management had already left earlier in the evening and it was just us little guys. We had zero oversight and no idea what to do.
As the outbreak progressed, we sent residents to another facility in Lafayette that was a dedicated covid ward. As that place filled up, we began taking on the overflow. The facility I worked at had five halls, two of them were filled with covid patients. These halls were cordoned off with hastily constructed, plastic zip walls that were stapled to 2×4 frames that had been nailed-gunned to the hallway walls and ceiling (not a criticism, just describing the scene). At the time I was making roughly 12-something an hour (we got small, quarterly raises) and I was expected to completely gussy up, gown, gloves, mask, face shield (ya know, the works), and not only deliver food trays to residents but then collect them when they were done. I can't tell you how many times I would go into a room one day and the next have one or both residents not be there because they had tested positive. I remember, every day, emptying the trash cans and as I pulled the bag up to get some handles to tie off with, a big waft of air from the bag would come up underneath my face shield and I would think to myself “Ah shit, this is the one that gets me”. The stress was so great one of the kitchen staff went to the hospital because of anxiety-induced chest pains. I would like to reiterate none of this was a part of the responsibilities for the job I was hired to do or the job I ended up doing.
Now, there was a safety net at first. The company allowed us to 'borrow' PTO if we contracted covid and had to miss two weeks of work. When 2021 rolled around, they completely revoked that. We were still very much in the throes of our outbreak. Hazard pay? Forget about it. Well, not for us anyway. Not for the nursing staff. Not for the housekeeping, or for the maintenance. Not even any of the management. No, of course not. Just for the Executive Director. The head honcho. Big man in charge went and gave himself hourly hazard pay as he hid in his fuckin office.
Oh yes, big man in charge. Let's talk about *him*. Lol. So, when I started there, he was very buddy-buddy. Honestly, it seemed like the friendliest place to work. I felt super comfortable joking around with the guy. His demeanor changed as soon as I got 'settled in'. One day he was suddenly very pedantic and would just become hostile out of nowhere for no reason. He would approach you when you were alone and just intensely interrogate you over really minor things. I remember before I left, I was taking the cafe cart (we would set up room trays for half of the facility in a cart that was half chilled, half warmed to set up and distribute the trays from a centralized location) to the cafe. I was fifteen minutes behind schedule because, well, shit happens sometimes and things get behind schedule. Big man in charge was there to help pass out trays. He decides it's a good use of my time to stop me and interrogate me on the spot instead of getting the show on the road. I distinctly remember him looking at the clock (I had to be down there at 1, it was 1:15) and asking why I was a full 45 minutes late. At this point in my history with him, I just shut down and said 'I don't know. I don't know what happened.' He let it go and we got to work. I believe it was the housekeeping director who asked me after he left with a tray what had happened and I explained it to her. He appeared from around the corner and asked me again. I repeated what I told him earlier. He then said, 'Well it sounds like you told *her* something different.' I didn't respond and just kept building the trays.
I didn't really know where to include this in a way that was fluid, but Big Man in Charge would be subtly sexist. Like, his pedanticism would become focused on women. An example: when a coworker and I were down at the cafe collecting room trays, he suddenly rounds the corner and starts berating her for wearing a pink shirt under her chef's coat. You could hardly tell, just a little peek of pink, nothing major. That warranted a strong, public scolding. Now we were supposed to be wearing face shields outside of the kitchen. Guess who was wearing a face shield and guess who forgot to put theirs on before they left? That's right, she was wearing hers, and I, the penis owner I am, had forgotten to grab mine in my haste to get down to the cafe and get crackin'. PPE seems like a much larger priority than dress code but in that situation, it was more favorable to crack down on a woman than it was on a man.
There was a guy working there who had been there for five years, right? I had actually worked with him before at a previous place. Dude is a major douchebag, super creepy, and has to harass anything with a warm hole. Could be funny though, sometimes was an alright guy. Anyways, he had only gotten worse in his sexually harassing ways since the last time I had worked with him (at the last job he had whipped his dick out and started beating off when he gave a female coworker a ride home, nothing was done about it besides she was fired and he ended up with a promotion). He would directly comment on the appearances of our female coworkers from other departments *to their faces*. He would ask them to 'give him a spin' or, when they asked for food, to 'give him a nip slip'. The food was free for employees btw. Whenever he walked behind a woman coworker, he would do that thing where some guys will put their hands on the woman's hips to slide behind them and get past. Idk, he made everyone uncomfortable as fuck. I remember staff from other departments leaving because of him. He was absolutely complained about but because he would reliably come in at five in the morning to do breakfast, he was protected. One day, someone gets fed up and calls the compliance hotline about it. That's the ace-in-the-hole for us and it's our only one. All complaints are anonymous and any compliance complaint looks super bad on the leadership.
Anyway, that anonymous part I mentioned? Not as true as you would like to think. Big Man in Charge knew *exactly* who submitted the complaint, dragged them into his office, and *bitched* them out for it. The person was then scheduled outside of their availability on the next schedule and was immediately terminated. Just like that. That is how powerful the favoritism is there.
Oh, the favoritism! Let me tell you about the straw that broke the camel's back for me with that place. There's this lady that works there that has been with the company for like 7, 8 years now? Honestly, a pretty sweet lady, super self-righteous though, and gets pretty fuckin manic at times. She has her struggles and we're all allowed our flaws, perfection is a pretty big ask of anyone. She got this dog, right? She decides to bring her fucking dog to work one day. Alright, uh, I guess that's ok, not really my call. We all went out there to pet and see the dog. She was a pretty skittish little yapper. Whatever. Then the lady decides to grab her things from the coat closet, which is actually *inside* the kitchen and acts as a buffer between the kitchen bathroom and the kitchen itself. So she brings her fucking dog into the goddamn kitchen. I couldn't believe it. In my ten years of kitchen experience, I had never seen someone bring a live animal into a kitchen, much less one for a healthcare industry building. You'd think the Director of Food Services or at least the cook on duty would say something, right? Nope. Absolute silence. I was the only one to say something. I wish I had taken a picture. I should of. I couldn't believe it. I had seen bloody chicken be sent out of that kitchen. I had seen still-pink meatloaf be served. Gloves were more recommended than required it seemed. I saw a dude wash the slime off of expired sliced turkey to make a sandwich with. All of this was just shrugged at and ho-hummed away. What if a resident had an allergy to dogs? Absolutely negligent behavior. I immediately applied elsewhere after that.
On the topic of unethical, possibly illegal, shit that got pulled, we always had issues with retaining nursing staff. The pay was poor and the Big Man in Charge was kind of a fucking shithead to them. One day, we just didn't have enough hands to feed the residents that needed assistance eating. So, they took a 20-year-old lady from the kitchen who was *not* at all certified and had her help them feed the residents. You *have* to be state certified to do that. You're not even allowed to touch the residents without being certified to do so. There was this one guy that was hired on as a CNA. Everyone starts off as a 'blue badge' for their first six months. During this time, this poor bastard was worked 95 hours in a single week and ended up being hospitalized due to exhaustion. 95 hours! In one week! Insane. I myself had to work 50-60 hours a week in the kitchen pulling 12-hour shifts. That kitchen was so frikkin' hot during the summer, I remember walking in and within five minutes having beads of sweating rolling down my face. I regularly had to wash my face off with cold water to try and cool down just a little bit. They had like two fans installed that didn't really do shit, as they had the ovens, the flat top, the fryer, the steam table, and the dish machine all in the same room. I couldn't just be like 'Hey, could you guys maybe work me a little less?' because it was either that or work 20-something hours a week. It was either be unable to pay my bills or be unable to walk when I got home due to the chafing.
There was this one time we got a new resident in from the hospital (honestly the campus was pretty ideally placed, right across the street from the hospital), it was pretty late but we asked for a meal order for them so we knew what kind of food to make them the next day. We were told not to worry about it, which we thought was weird but whatever. That resident had died within hours of being taken in at that location. The health campus had literally milked that person of their insurance money during the last few hours of their life. Their last function in this world was as a minor cash cow.
Remember the healthcare benefits I brought up earlier? When I was hired, I was told that benefits were offered to full-time employees. Cool, I was supposed to be hired on full-time anyways. Obviously, that didn't happen. What's interesting is that they didn't actually lie to me about that, they just excluded that they offer the benefits to part-time employees as well. Now one of the 'cool' things they 'offered' was the potential for free health insurance. This tone never changed, I was told that the entire time all I had to do was pick the basic package and pass a nicotine test. When enrollment time came around, I enrolled in benefits and didn't smoke for like a week (I actually ended up quitting altogether, yay for me). I passed the nicotine test and when my first check came with my benefits attached, I was shocked to see I was being charged. I asked multiple times about this and never got a straight answer. I was growing increasingly angry about this until I involved HR and demanded to speak to the Big Man in Charge. HR was under the impression I could just opt out (lmfao), the Executive Director's solution to my problem was to spend *more* money on an HSA to get money back at the end of the year in some weird credit thing that I could spend on toothpaste, toiletries, tylenol, whatever. Stupid. Oh, come to find out, they had changed the wellness credit (the nicotine test) without telling anyone, so a lot of people were surprised and angry about it. The only people who were good were the ones who were enrolled the year before. Remember that friend that was given the job I was hired to do? She was the only one who was able to benefit from that because she was specifically told that she could apply for benefits within thirty days of being hired. Fucking favoritism.
Ah, let's talk about how this health campus manufactures its online presence. Being the 'flagship campus' of Trilogy Healthcare in the Lafayette area, it has a reputation it needs to maintain. Now I would name this campus, but the subreddit FAQ has indicated this wouldn't be a favorable thing for me to do. I really, really want to but I don't want to risk my membership here. Anyway, this campus absolutely has its business office employees make fake google accounts to leave positive reviews whenever their ratings get too low. You can actually observe the trend of batches of five-star reviews that are left (the reviews are almost exclusively five and one star). I remember going through the reviews and feeling like shit for working there when I saw things like residents having their call lights taken away or having medicine withheld, losing weight because they weren't being fed, and having bed sores. I had no idea stuff like that was going on. I still feel sick for having ever been proud to work there. I have personally made it my goal to honestly and earnestly talk about my experience working there. They wasted a year and a half of my life, I have decided I will spend a year and a half bitching about that shit hole.
I am doing much better now, I can't say I am exactly *happy* to be working where I am at but I'm not spending every minute of my day miserable and angry. I'm working far fewer hours making more money with benefits that are a bit more expensive but far more comprehensive (and I actually knew I would be paying for them). It's even closer to where I live, it's a 5-7 minute walk.
Thanks for reading my rant.