It's All About Me...Again!

Forgive me if my head starts to swell. Once again, I was reminded by my employer...IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!!

Behold: Employee Appreciation Day...on a budget. All of us, from the loftiest administrator to the lowliest janitor, received a 4 x 4 Rubik's Cube with inspirational messages on it's sides, and a lemon shake-up in a commemorative plastic cup in reward for another year of heroic lifesaving.


We decided that management probably does appreciate us, but apparently they don't have a lot of faith in our cogitatin' skills...hence the Rubik's For Dummies. But what it lacks in challenges it
more than makes up for in Soviet-style exhortations. Be efficient! Be safe! And remember...it's all about YOU!

We all trooped down to the employee cafeteria promptly at shift change in order to show our employee I.D. badges and receive our cube and our watery lemonade, in a plastic cup that said, predictably, "For US, it's all about YOU!" on it's side.

It's hard to imagine that without the I.D. badges, interlopers would be swarming in to clean us out of plastic cups and inspirational cubes. More likely, management used the badges to record the names of the non-cube-and-plastic-cup-acceptors for possible re-education and disciplinary action later. Perhaps a year or two of mopping the floors in the gulags of ICU and Peds will inspire you to show up for Employee Appreciation Day, eh?

Okay...I don't want to sound ungrateful. I realize that there are 3,000 employees at this hospital, but...c'mon. Which corporate nimrod scratched his head all afternoon to come up with the festive Rubik's Cube-Lite/lemonade extravaganza? How about the $2 that they spent on each of us as a cash award? At least we could have eaten in the cafeteria instead.

Sometimes, when I'm alternately shaking my head and making fun of management, I remember what one of my better bosses said when I worked for the Forest Service. She said, "When you're in a meeting and you hear yourself saying, 'They're going to love this out in the field,' you know it's been too long since you were out in the field."

I picture the management team like Santa's reindeer: lashed together, and valiently following the guy with the shiniest nose into the inky black void. They don't actually know any employees, but if they did, they're sure they'd appreciate them. In the meantime...have a cube.

It's six more days until the employee year-end reviews begin. So I have six days to, as Cool Hand Luke famously said, "Get my mind right." By this time next week, I plan to be cheerful, optimistic, ambitious, thrifty, brave, loyal, and reverent.

But that leaves me 5.9 days to be a cynical, sarcastic bitch, and I plan to use every moment of it to it's maximum potential. Because I'm that kind of efficient employee.