I play Tetris for a Living

So I had another shower epiphany. So I'm sure I've complained a lot about work. And sometimes I gave y'all a glimpse of what goes on at work. But I don't think I've ever really broken down what I go through. Nursing is basically a game of Tetris.

Have you ever played Tetris on b-type? You know where you start at a level all discombobulated and have to clear a certain amount of lines to clear that stage. Well remember how a-type was where you just start with a clean slate and clear lines indefinitely until you lose. Imagine them combined, and I think there is a setting like this but I don't know what it is called. Just imagine, you start a stage all scattered but this time there's no set of lines to clear, just a time limit. Pieces start to fall and of course, it's chaos but it's more like organized chaos and you can handle it. You start to pick away at the little gaps but soon enough you realized you cleared enough lines and you're four levels above where you started and pieces are dropping faster. Of course you're a pro so you're just dropping the pieces the right places but for some dumb reason you just miss a piece and now you just compounded your problem. So now the entire time you're spending all your efforts fixing this one small mistake. You're so busy laying pieces down you can't even see what piece is falling next. You just just lay down pieces on the fly and hope you can rely on your instincts to place them. But oddly enough twelve hours have past and time is up. And it's not "Time's Up Game Over." It's more like, "Time's Up, still clean up your mess then it's game over." It's as if when the time is up, no longer are the pieces dropping at a million miles per hour and instead you can take your time and use up your own time because you're paid on salary and it's awesome to stay at work longer than you have to. Now you have a clean slate and can go home.

I won't lie, I do have a good day and I get to go home on time. I figured in the nursing world, going home on time actually means, going home within an hour of when you're supposed to. And I love the fact that on paper we do 12 hour shifts but when you read the schedule, it's scheduled from 645 to 715 so we're doing 12.5 hour shift. What's funny is the reasoning for that extra half hour is because we're supposed to get a half hour lunch break during our shift. I won't lie, I only had a couple other jobs and I didn't take them too seriously but don't most jobs include lunches as part of the work day? So ok on average I do 13 hours on every shift. Not bad since I'll just work 3-4 days a week. Sounds pretty good right? Well you see sure it's nice when you have 3-4 days straight on and have a 3-4 day weekend. Nope we don't do scheduling like that. For some reason we like to do like two days on then one day off and then a day on then two days off. So this awesome idea of planning a weekend getaway doesn't happen because you get crapped on.

So now imagine playing tetris, but now you have to deal with grumpy co-workers because just about everyone has this fantastic schedule and everyone is just burnt out. Dumb things happen and patients die or end up in the icu, pretty long story so I'll probably talk about in another post. And at the end of the day, you have to tell yourself, it's time to go get some rest so you can do this all over again in less than 10 hours. And while I'm complaining about scheduling, I just want to say I don't know what companies do this but some how if I take a week of leave, I have to work 60 hours the week before I leave and 60 hours the week I come back. It's as if I never left. LOL?