Are these really the people that should be required to work so much? Isn’t their job about handling life and death daily? Wouldn’t we want exactly these people to come fully rested to work every single day and be fully staffed?
I don’t know if there are jobs with similar stakes that are so carelessly staffed and disgustingly paid.
Most of them actually. Am a nurse and was once psychiatrically hospitalized alongside a train conductor and we really bonded over our ridiculous and yet supposedly “high reliability industry” jobs. She actually got hooked on speedballs because there’s some weird loophole in our state where the train conductors need to give something like 48–72h notice or something to take sick leave so most of them just show up for their 16h shifts fucked up on amphetamines to stay awake then benzos so the amphetamines don’t give them tachycardia and one of her managers actually basically gave her a pep talk on which doctors to go to and what to say to get them prescribed legally but given that they’re both extremely addictive substances her dosages spiraled wildly out of control extremely quickly such that she was only able to get effective doses extralegally. On the plus side though losing that job and getting shipped to the other end of the state just to find a bed got her away from both her dealer and her cartoonishly abusive ex (even a week into her stay the bruising was pretty wild). And then actually when I left the hospital my third time I met my now husband in partial although we lost touch for like a year until we ran into each other again and he helped me escape my much more subtly shitty relationship and actually graduate / get licensed (if you think nurse pay is shit I was getting paid $12.50 as a nursing assistant working with criminally insane men and that was after the promotion).
that train disaster in '23 is telling how badly understaffed purposely the trains are in america, that companies that own these are unwilling to pay for more staff, or give any time off in short notice to people. is that a CNA job? that is not even worth the stress, might as well work for a grocery chain or walmart at that point.
This was back in 2015ish, they’re probably making ~$20/h these days but still. Yeah some people had a CNA but a lot of that job was people that were unemployable elsewhere for reasons other than straight up crime (for the most part, anyway. There were a few employees with DUIs, public intoxication, etc). I was young and had found out about the job from being hospitalized there and went back because from the care I received I figured it couldn’t be that hard to be better at that job (it wasn’t, but not by as much as I would have hoped) and, most importantly, I wanted to #HelpPeople.
The upside is that job on a psych nurse resume is basically an instant callback. I might get paid shit but as long as I’m upright and don’t have too bad of a TBI I’ll basically never be jobless. I’ve gotten callbacks within 12h of applying, one of them I didn’t even finish / submit. I also graduated early into COVID then worked straight through so my resume is just overall fucking baller. If I wasn’t too AuDHD to deal with learning a new hospital every 12 weeks I could probably make bank as a travel nurse. I really enjoyed teaching self defense and restraint classes this last year so I really just need to go back to school and get my masters.
And compared to when I was young and stupid people listen when I start telling stories so that’s been somewhat affirming. It’ll probably make an utterly wild memoir if I live about 30 more years. Hubs says he wants to take me to one of those crowd work shows because siccing me on people at parties is starting to get boring.