I think Livejournal hates me. Make that the second post that vanished into the ether because I made the mistake of hitting Enter in the wrong box. No, I don't get it either, or understand why this thing interpreted my hitting Enter as a desire to Work Offline. Oh well. I'll give this another go, shall I?

Why is that on every ward I've worked on - with the possible exception of the Community placement - there is at least one complete moron? Maybe it's some kind of mysterious NHS Directive of mystery. Equal opportunities for freaking idiots and that kind of thing? It's the only way to explain the presence of the ubiquitous Ward Idiots, if you ask me. One on every ward area, just so that the all-important Freaking Idiots lobby can't complain that, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the NHS is not an Equal Opportunities employer.

Not that the NHS could ever be accused of being undiverse. As long as you have a pulse, there's a job for YOU in today's modern NHS. And they're working on getting the zombies through the doors, too.

Anyway - Ward Idiots. They're there and they're just waiting to piss you off with their complete and utter gormlessness and inertia. On this particular ward, the resident Idiot is a student who also goes to my college. She's a third year and, at a conservative estimate, at least ten years older than I am (the staff nurse who genuinely seems to think the Harry Potter novels are Satanic because they talk about people performing magic without the Intercession of the Holy Spirit is a bit bizarre given that I've read them and have no more magical abilities now than I did before I picked the first one up, but she's not a Ward idiot. She's just let her religion send her a little nuts). Yet, when I talk to said student, I feel like her senior. Sigh.

Sample Interaction (Mis)remembered from Yesterday...

It's lunchtime. Well, not my lunchtime, but we've hit that rather protracted period of the day when the ward staff will drift off in ones or twos to go and get something to eat. During said period I go and answer a call bell in the top bay, which I'm not looking after, as the staff nurse who had been allocated to it was off the ward. This has the direct consequence of lumbering me with a commode chair and bedsheets to change. Not pleasant, but par for the course in nursing.

On my way the sluice room, another patient in the same bay mentions that he needs a bottle (that kind of bottle). I say okay, I'll get him one. Problem is, the patient in question wouldn't mention anything of the sort if he wasn't desperate, and I don't want to leave the horrible commode chair unattended and uncleaned - a rather protracted process thanks to the bedpan washer being broken - when I go get him a bottle. Spotting the Ward Idiot at the nurse's station, lumpishly staring at the hospital formulary (making me think, uh-oh, can't she handle the BNF?) I ask her for help. Leading to...

Me: Can you get Mr A a bottle please (Insert Name Here)?
Ward Idiot: Um... is he in the top bay?
Me: Yes, can you get him one? I think he really needs it.
Ward Idiot: I'm not looking after that bay. [turns back to formulary]
Me: Nor am I. Can you get him a bottle anyway?

Look, Ward Idiot, I'm sorry I took moments out of your precious 'standing at nurse's station and staring at a book' time. But god damn it, how hard is it to tell that the nurse looking after those patients isn't actually bloody here at the moment and therefore the rest of us are going to have to cover it as best we can? I hate staff who act like it's none of their business to help a patient they haven't been allocated to care for on that particular shift. Come on, you don't need to be allocated to a bay to go get someone in it a bottle, do you? This woman has the 'someone else can do it' attitude down pat. And someone else (someone like me, or the other third year student nurse who was on duty that day), normally does do it, but the point is that said someone wasn't her when there was no earthly reason why it couldn't have been.

In short - she's an idiot. She has no initiative (well, see above, I suppose), seems to need huge amounts of hand-holding, seems stumped by simple nursing tasks that really, she should have hands doewn three years into her training and has no conversation, either. Yesterday also held a bizarre pseudosocratic dialogue between the Ward Idiot, myself and a watching HCA over whether or not my breaktime biscuits had come from the kitchen (Where did you get biscuits? The kitchen. Oh, I thought... you'd got them from the kitchen. I did get them from the kitchen. They're in the kitchen. Ohhh...).

God damn it, shoot me now.

Oh well, that's enough of that. Now to answer a few of my comments, just for fun of course, then go and make food and with any luck get a little nearer to finishing Chapter 20 of 'Seuche'. It should not be taking me almost a goddamn month to write fic chapters. Maybe I can blame tiredness, or the job... something's eating my brain when it really shouldn't be and making me lose my focus. It annoys me. I like writing this fic and want bothy to do it justice and do it quicker than I am. I hate making people wait on me, but my real life is stifling my fic-writing time at the moment. I just keep losing my focus, because I'm too freakin' tired to concentrate on anything more demanding than an MST...

mmm. MSTs. No. I must ignore the MSTs. At least for today. I must be strong - but just running through one of them couldn't hurt, right? Could it? I mean... dayumn, badfic is so... bad. Could we please declare a moratorium on how many OCs can be raped in one calendar year? And how many new team members has Weiss had now? And why are they all called Calico, for fuck's sake?

Ah, that's better. Now that's the kind of thing I like getting annoyed about.