Pete Dodd Dot Com (.us)

I’m going to start this whole thing with a disclaimer, because I start every conversation I have with everyone with disclaimers or explanations or excuses or whatever.  It’s what I do and even though i know I do it, and I know it’s unnecessary, I can’t stop myself from doing it anyway.  So the disclaimer here is that I am very, very frustrated…  but, I know that I really have no one to be frustrated at but myself.  I mean, that’s kinda the point of everything im about to write.  But the bottom line is that i fucked up at work and now I am reaping the consequences.  I also know that bitching about work online is about as bad of a move as one could possibly make.   ANNNNNDDDD, I know that with my job in particular talking about it in public is generally a no-no.  In fact, it can be illegal.

This isn’t going to be illegal though, at least as far as I can tell.  If you don’t know what I do lets just call myself a social worker.  Or a caregiver.  Actually i guess caregiver is closer to the proper definition.  So, obviously, I can’t talk about the folks I give care to.  But that’s fine because this isn’t about them.  When it comes to my job, in regards to them, everything is great.  This is about everything else.

I guess the short version is that once a year you need to jump through a couple hoops to keep your “med certification.”   This has changed over time, but usually involves a test, sometimes it involves pouring meds in front of the nurse and getting quizzed on the drugs you’re giving.   The whole thing always seemed so silly to me.  I think the reason for that is that I started in this field in Vermont, which has much, much, much, much, much less bureaucracy surrounding everything.  On my first day on the job, my first day in the field, I was given a bunch of pills and told “give these to her at night.”

You know why that’s all I was told?  BECAUSE THAT’S HOW EASY IT IS!  But, we live in the land of the sue happy.  I live in the state where a few caregivers decided they wanted to go shopping  and they left the person they were giving care to in their car with the windows rolled up and that person died.  Everyone feels like they have to cover their ass from every possible angle.  So, if you want to give meds as a caregiver in CT you need to take a 40 hour course.  And then you need to do a huge test (I believe it was 80 questions… it was 8 years ago so my memory is fuzzy) and you have to fake giving meds in front of the instructor…  and then you go back to the house you work at and you have to give meds in front of your nurse there.  And then, even though you passed and you’ve had your work checked twice, you still have to wait several weeks until your med card comes in because if you try to dispense meds without it certainly the world will explode.

The absolute silliness of med giving is not my gripe however.  That’s just one in a long list of gripes about how we have become such an overprotective society that we’ve lost so much common sense.  And the thing is, if you suck at your job, if you are truly a terrible person and you are so preoccupied with other shit in your life that you are going to fuck up giving meds…  a 40 hour class WILL NOT CHANGE THAT.  So in the end it’s a pain in the ass for those of us who have a very basic capacity for critical thought, and it has zero effect on those that don’t.

I don’t even mean to go off on this tangent.  My issue is that I was supposed to take this test by this thursday and I didn’t.  My excuse is that I didn’t know.  I, like an idiot, thought that I had until the end of March.  I should have checked.  Double checked.  Triple checked.  But I didn’t.  I got a frantic call from my boss at 12:30 asking me if I had taken my med test.  I had no idea what he was talking about.  I was high out of my mind on codeine and already freaking the fuck out.  I was on my way to the oral surgeon to get two teeth extracted and two small chunks of my jaw bone removed.  This was a big deal, not  just because of the obvious pain, but because my anxiety disorder has kept me away from dentists for over a decade.  They scare the fucking shit out of me.  It’s not rationale, I actually don’t even mind the pain or the drills or anything.  But anxiety disorders aren’t rationale.   Anyway, I told my boss I couldn’t even think (because, really, I couldn’t) and got off the phone.  But as I sat in the surgeons room as he shot Novocaine into my mouth over and over (I swear it was like 15 shots) the adrenaline from what was about to happen to me kinda washed the haze out of my brain created by the codeine.   The surgeon called Arnee in to go over options to replace one of the teeth (I had a molar and a wisdom tooth removed –  he wanted to replace the molar, obviously).   We have no money so it was like LOLOLOLOL $4000, um no, I’ll live with a space there thank you.  But her being in there gave me the chance to ask her to call my boss.   This shit at work had officially started wearing heavier on my brain than the surgery that was about to happen.

The extraction was fine, by the way.  I mean it took him forever, he even commented on how i had some of the toughest teeth to pull he had seen in a while.  And the sound of his pliers cracking the teeth in half was somewhat jarring — but i couldn’t feel a damn thing so I actually didn’t mind the whole thing.  I didn’t freak out.  Cool.

After getting orders not to talk for the rest of the day I got out and called my boss and tried to plead my case.  I didn’t know!  If only someone had told me I would have done it!  It’s not like I knew and willfully decided not to do it.  In fact, a few weeks ago I made a special trip into CT just for the sole reason of getting a bunch of trainings done.  I was told at that point I was caught up on everything.  I also just a few weeks ago had my quarterly evaluation, where we talked about how I needed to do those trainings, but there was no mention of the med test.

Again, I know it’s my job to know.  If my boss were to read this he would be screaming at the screen “BUT ITS NOT OUR JOB TO TELL YOU WHEN YOUR STUFF IS DUEEEEEEE!”  And he’s right.  But it’s unfortunate.

On the new Bright Eyes album Conor sings the phrase “I wouldn’t waste another thought — on what is fair and what is not.”  He’s right, but I am going to waste thoughts on it, in fact I’ll probably waste several thousand words on it.

There are things I am not good at and there are things I do well.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s true of 105% of all humans.  In my job, I am really good at bringing calm to situations that are otherwise frantic.  I am also good at keeping the atmosphere light.  I’ve gotten better at things like cooking and cleaning.  I am bad, however, at remembering things like trainings.  What ends up happening is that what I suck at becomes the obsession.  It’s not just me, this isn’t Pete Dodd specific behavior.  It’s just the way humans are.   I mean, I may actually be in the running for the husband of the year award, and most of the time my wife would agree with that, but if you catch her in the proper mood every single good deed I do won’t matter, what will matter are my weaknesses.  Did I sit with her last night talking her through a crying panic attack?  Yes.  Does that matter right now?  No, the fact that I suck at saving money does.  Did I suck at money last night when I sat with her?  Yes.  Did it matter then?  No.

Life isn’t fair.  Boo fucking hoo.  There are million of kids that will work their asses off this quarter at school only to get a C in gym and get reamed out for that C instead of praised for the A+’s in some sort of super math that their parents couldn’t even comprehend.  We are obsessed with the negative!  And that’s what is happening with me right now.  Everyone involved… my boss, the nurse, the people at the main office, everyone… they all know I suck at knowing when I have to do trainings.  They know I’m great at my job, they know that the guys I take care of are safe and calm and happy when I’m there.  But that doesn’t matter.  HE SUCKS AT TRAININGS!  HE MUST BE PUNISHED.

If at any point one of those people said “hey, Pete, you’re med thing is due March 3″ I would not be in this position right now.  But, again, for the 90th time, it’s not their job to tell me that.  So they didn’t.  And im sure they want me to learn my lesson.  Will I?  Time will tell, I guess.

So, the bottom line is that the administration is deciding over the next week whether to pull me off the schedule (without pay) until I take the med course again (which can be a few months from now).  It’s like being fired without the ability to collect unemployment.

I just feel so frustrated.  I know it’s my fault.  I know.  I know.  I KNOW!  But there’s this part of my brain, that’s still bathed in the idealist that teenage Pete Dodd was, that wishes the world was filled with people helping each other out.  When i started at my job I worked almost all of my shifts with this one girl.  She was a mom and she was great at the stereotypical (in the old fashioned sense) “mom stuff.”  She cooked, because the food she made was great, and the food I made was poop.  She cleaned because when she did it the house looked and smelled great and when I did it the house looked slightly less like a disaster (but a disaster none the less).  But there were things within the job she was not great at.  When one of the guys had a really hard time he needed 1 on 1 attention.  She hated doing this.  There were actually a bunch of situations like that — that she just wasn’t good at.  I was.  I would spend hours sitting in the guys rooms, helping them calm down, cracking jokes, generally trying to make people happy.  It was awesome, between the two of us we worked the perfect shift.  The guys were happy, emergencies were handled with as little stress as possible, the house was in great condition, the paperwork was filled out…

But then they took me off the schedule with her because we weren’t “learning new skills.”  First off, that wasn’t true.  She saw how I handled the guys, I learned quite a few things about cooking that i still use (bouillon cubes in the water that’s cooking brown rice…. mmmm).  But I get what they were going for, and over time I got better at that stuff, and she got better at my stuff.  But, to be completely honest, in the eight years I’ve been there I have never been part of a shift that did everything so perfectly.  We worked together 4 times a week, and everything was great.  If you look at the data taken from that time, I would be willing to be that behavior-wise the guys did best during that period.  But the obsession with our weaknesses meant that we had to be broken up.  And the house was worse off for it, even if it means I can cook a pork chop now.

This silly idealism would be great in everything.  Like if republicans were truly just worried about fiscal responsibility and personal freedom and liberals were worried about environmental conservation and social justice and both worked together, as each party’s strength is the other’s weakness.   But, no, that’s now how it works.  Democrats hate republicans for not giving a shit about the environment… and republicans hate democrats for putting all these rules in the way of them making money.

I’m 33 now… 2 months out from turning 34.  I’m married.  We will hopefully have children in a few years.  It’s time for me to grow up.  Life isn’t fair.  My wife is miserable a large chunk of the time because her mother’s grasp on reality is slipping.  My wife is also having trouble getting work sometimes (and working too much other times).   Im also rushing her to the ER with ovary pain.  And we’re spending weeks sleeping on her mother’s couch trying to take care of her which is mentally more than should be asked of Arnee.  I’m having teeth extracted and stomach pains so fucking bad that had my wife not been there I would have taken an ambulance to a hospital.  Fuck, I could go on, but it doesn’t matter.  This is life, this is what people do.  It sucks, but whining about it isn’t going to do a goddamn thing.  Right now, at my job, what matters is that I didn’t do this test.  All of my good deeds don’t count, no matter how much I wish someone would go “you know what Pete, you do a lot of good work, we’re gonna let this one slide, and we know you will be in the same position next year so since I’m good at scheduling I’ll make sure to give you a reminder call 2 weeks early next year.”   That, literally, is too much to ask.  Humans just aren’t willing to do that shit.  I need to grow the fuck up.

I will say this though.  This year has sucked, but without my wife it would have been a disaster.  There’s a reason that people with anxiety disorders are either alcoholics or suicidal.  I’m neither, and that’s because of Arnee.  I feel like she is the only thing holding me together sometimes.  I guess our marriage is what I was the ideal i was talking about in this post.  We fill in for each others weaknesses.  I comfort her through the really tough shit she is dealing with.  She takes charge and calls the dentist when i would just go on living in pain.  Even through all of the insanity of this year, even if that includes me getting fired (or “removed from the schedule”) I know i’m going to look back on our first year of marriage as a happy time.  Funny how that works.