Good evening, blogging friends, here I am again participating in this weekend's contest. This time, I've chosen a topic that's quite dear to me, given the nature of the Italian job market.
"Have you ever loved your job but hated working there because of workplace politics, toxicity, or other people at work? Explain."
Yes, now I'll tell you about my experience with a job I loved, but which ultimately led to burnout. In mid-2020, right during the COVID pandemic, I completed my nursing assistant training. After my internship (again during the COVID pandemic, in a hospital where I enjoyed it anyway), I did small substitutions where, well, I didn't have time to figure out whether I was comfortable or not. Then I was hired by a cooperative (these are associations that provide social health care, often with underpaid and poorly structured contracts, but unfortunately, private healthcare is almost entirely in their hands). The atmosphere wasn't great even in the first few weeks. There were two centers, one for seniors with mild dementia and another for severe dementia and late-stage Alzheimer's. I started at the first center, but right from the start, some colleagues were really rude and angry. The center was a mess, poorly organized, unlike the hospital, which was very organized. The seniors were divided into rooms, but the other staff called them by name or nickname, and since there were more than 20 of them, I couldn't remember them all. For twenty people, we had five nursing assistants and two nurses, which was really too few to clean, feed, and entertain them. Furthermore, no one gave me any instructions on how to work, and it seemed like the environment was run by small groups that handled everything their own way. However, after the initial difficulties, I began to understand the rules of the work group, and above all, I was very appreciated by the patients. I enjoyed my job, both the relationship with the patients and the feeling of being useful to them. I didn't like the decidedly low salary and the unpaid overtime. But unfortunately, work in Italy in many fields is like this: unpaid extra hours, a thousand demands, an unsuitable work environment, we only had one shower, half the equipment and broken chairs (especially dangerous for patients), few masks and hand sanitizer, we had to buy our own uniforms and shoes without obviously any reimbursement.
However, I had adapted to this ecosystem, even if I wasn't entirely satisfied with the working conditions, I loved my patients, they gave me a lot of joy and satisfaction and I was also improving a lot in the various tasks including the kitchen (which in theory should be done by a chef but to save money we assistants took care of it, same thing for the cleaning of the center) then they moved me to another center, dealing with patients with Alzheimer's or severe dementia is not easy, many are violent and difficult to manage but the problem there was not them but a colleague who was a real monster, first of all she was sexist, she assigned cleaning shifts only to women, she always saved money for men and we screamed and scolded if we dusted badly, she had archaic and in my opinion horrible methods for cleaning or taking the patients to the bathroom, if they didn't pee when she took them she gave them ice-cold showers on their genitals, for me it was real violence, I and the younger ones were always treated badly, she was the oldest and then she had pre-beds all men She would take on the most thankless tasks, like cleaning up after someone who had vomited or had diarrhea, saying it was a women's issue. Even though I loved my job, I reluctantly started going there, especially when she was on shift, because I knew it would be a nightmare. But the worst was yet to come...
The cooperative where I worked wasn't doing well and the salaries started late so they joined another cooperative, and there I got furious because since I had previous experience in the social sector (I worked in family homes for foreigners/refugees and minors) they thought it was a good idea to move me to a community for drug addicts, I had almost all the night shifts where I was alone and instead of my eight hours I always did 9 or 10, the latter unpaid but given in 4 euro meal vouchers, a pittance, plus being with 15 people who suffer from drug addiction at night alone without the slightest training was a nightmare, it would take another thousand posts to tell you all the episodes, the abuses and the methods of the community, even if there was no nurse I prepared the therapies which is not legal because I could only do it under the supervision of the nurse or a doctor (which we didn't have) little by little due to the stress I started to lose weight, to take anxiolytics and to be afraid of going to work and I went into burnout in I was sick for almost a month due to stress. And then guess what, the cooperative went bankrupt? They practically laid us all off, and we didn't see our last paychecks until six months later. I loved my job as a nursing assistant, but since then I haven't been able to do it except for very small substitutions. A nasty, disorganized, toxic environment and low wages make you hate even a job you love!
First picture edited by my phone translation with deepl.
