Hey y'all. I live in Louisiana. I am a clinical laboratory scientist. I did this in the Army from 2003 onward, took a break to get a M.Ed., decided I hated entitled little shits and their fake religious parents, went back to the lab.
Got hired at the place I work now in 2016. I helped them set up this lab, get all the equipment validated, and up and running. Since then, many things that directly affect my job has happend. The number of clients we get patient samples from has gone up 10x, our ER reopend, oh yeah, COVID HAPPENED>
My wife got pregnant after 17 years of us trying. Right after she graduated law school. In the middle of a pandemic. In a place where people are generally idiots. So I took several months off to await the birth of this expensive as hell IVF baby. ( She is awesome ,btw. )
My old job literally begged me to come back, and offered me a $7500 signing bonus. That was July of last year. Since then, we have lost all of our managers from the director on down, plus 80% of the experienced staff. We have a severe shortage of licensed folks in this state, and hospitals, travel tech agencies, and other places are throwing money at anyone with experience and a license.
I trained my new supervisor. Our new director literally got the job because she happened to be there as an interview failed (she was that location's technical supervisor at the time). We have three experienced folks at my site, and we got several fresh out of school people. Supply chain issues are affecting us, and some accountant somewhere decided that we should buy our analyzers outright (dumb), not get service contracts (dumber) and not increase staff and testing capacity as our patient load grew. (dumbest).
Basically, I am holding together this place. I have trained all the new staff, while working full time, trying to correct the new people's mistakes so they don't kill someone…..
I took the first vacation I have had in five years, and promptly got COVID. While I was recovering, I got a notification from HR that my annual evaluation was completed. We have three levels. Top Talent, Highly Valued, and Needs Improvement. TT gets a 3% annual raise and like 0.005 more GPT hours accured. HV gets 2%. NI gets nothing. We also have this thing I have heard about called success share which seems to be some sort of profit sharing, but I have never gotten it. HR is very good at finding ways to deny people who actually work anything extra. Although after Hurricane Ida they did give us all 25$ gas cards because people were having trouble getting to work.
Anyway, vacation ends, I go back to work to learn that our hospital was hit by a massive ransomware attack, that the brain trust at the top of the organization refused to pay the ransom. So we had ten days of doing everything on paper. Then I got to spend seven days trying to fix things, order tests, make sure patient results were properly MANUALLY recorded. There were no experienced people on site when this occured, and they didn't bother calling any of us, because they wanted to keep it in house and quiet. I solved the problem in six days, and at the end, my evaluation was the same as it always is, Highly Valued.
I got a bit pissed. So I sent a long email (if you made it this far, you know I am kinda overly verbose) to the CFO, director, my supervisor, and the head of HR. I tried to tag in the hospital CEO, but was given an error message that said “You are not authorized to email directly. ” This guy brags about his open door policy, btw. Just nothing in writing.
So….I have a meeting with all of these people on Wednesday. I am going to explain to them exactly what is wrong, and what needs to get fixed. I have already warned my direct supervisor that I am going to be recording the meeting, and if I hear any HR fuckery, I am leaving. I will keep everyone posted.