I Snapped

At one of my newer coworkers. I felt so bad about it on the drive home the other night because I didn't want to be like that. It was unfortunately necessary because she didn't seem to understand my shift is over at 11. I can't stay for half an hour past that just to hold her hand and explain things to her that she should already know. But I was willing to quickly do what I could, and asked her to log into our computer system so I could walk her through something. She ignored me while reading some stupid post it note. I asked her again to log in. Again, she ignored me in favor of this stupid piece of yellow paper. So I snapped, and said log in again in a not very nice manner, but in an urgent, move your ass kind of way. She finally started moving and logged in.

If you need my help, especially when you are asking for it when I should be walking out the door, you need to be quick with it. I'm so willing to help, but when it crawls into the territory of me potentially getting into trouble because I'm staying way past my time, I'm not ok with that. She is very nice, but it just seems to take a lot for things to sink in. Of course this is certainly better than the other new girl who is terrorizing our overnight care managers because she's on some "I'm a nurse, bitches..... now bow before me" power trip.

Don't piss off the ones who can be your biggest help!! In my work, the care managers don't work under us, they have their own supervisors, routines, chores, etc. that they manage completely on their own. Do I sometimes call them when I need help sitting a resident up so I can give them their pills? Yes, but I always thank them. I am constantly thanking them. I do not want to be the nurse they hate working with, and luckily I think most of them like me. I may direct them to do certain things from to time, but its usually only from a medical stand point, where I am the ruling factor. Otherwise, I don't worry about if they are doing their job or not, cuz that isn't MY job to do so. So, I hope the other newbie can figure this out, or she's not going to have a team at night that wants to work with her. And she's already got a nursing team that isn't sure they want to work with her. We had really high hopes for her, especially cause she was a medic, but she's just getting weird.

I'm always intrigued by the diverse type of personalities that choose to become nurses. Some are just nurturing all around, and you want to be besties with them. Some are straight up hateful, but they know their shit. Some just seem like they are going through the motions. Some have the caring part down, but don't have a clue what's going on and have no instincts at all. I feel I have been blessed with a good mix of caring, having some instincts to know when something's wrong and what to do, and I learn quickly. So if I mess up, I instantly learn. I'm certainly far from perfect.

In other news, my laptop is dead. The screen was smashed when my hubby accidentally stepped on it. It's my fault for setting it on the floor. We were looking at $100 for Best Buy to back up the files and pictures from it, $35 to diagnose and give a repair estimate, then I'm sure at least a couple hundred dollars to replace the screen on a laptop I bought 2.5 years ago, with a total cost of $700 that included the 2 year warranty that expired in March. It's certainly not worth the base price it was 2.5 years ago. Plus the charger connection port was failing and it was difficult to keep a charge on it. So, we opted to not repair it.

Mike was able to save us $100 by hooking up the laptop to our desktop monitor, so we just copied everything over to a flash drive. Monkeys could do it! It was seriously super easy. So now on to the shopping for a new laptop. I have enjoyed my Sony Vaio, if I were going to go the PC route, I'd buy this brand again. But I have learned there are no local repair shops, so if anything does go wrong, I'd have to ship it out. They also have the new Windows 8 with all the weird boxes on the desktop. I haven't played with it, but my gut instinct is that I'm not gonna like it. It looks too busy, and I like having all the icons to one side or in one nice tidy space.

Then there is the MacBook Air. I am a fan of Apple products. I have my iPhone and my iPad. But the idea of switching from PC to Mac is a bit intimidating. The first computers I ever used were Apple or Macs in school, but I've otherwise always used PCs. Plus the base price is a few hundred dollars higher. There are Apple stores everywhere around us if I did ever have an issue, plus I have friends who love theirs. So, I've gotta go play around with them and check them out before I decide. I have to admit though, I am finding myself already being swayed heavily to the Mac side.