The way the world is going, I imagine there are parallels to this story in just about every line of work, and I'd like to hear more of them. Let's open a window and shine some light on this rot that is growing among us.
So many of us are suffering from the effects of this societal disease but it affects each of us differently, and it is often those who work hardest, who take their job the most seriously, who suffer the most.
When work needs to be done but you are surrounded by poorly trained, unmotivated, incompetent people, what do you, a serious person, do? You pick up the slack. You make up the difference. And you do it day after day, for years, until it drives you mad. You crack. You blow up, you drink, you quit. You move on to something new, thinking it will be better there, only to find the same familiar rot.
Before I was an electrician I was a line cook, and there were similar dynamics at play. I spent the best years of my life (physically: my late teens and twenties), slowly losing my mind in hot, claustrophobic, stainless steel crucibles. I was trying to keep the ship afloat on razor-thin labour margins, set by wealthy owners who couldn't be bothered to pay enough to keep quality cooks around long enough to establish a culture of quality. Those who left early were the smart ones; I was the fool.
My wife, a nurse, tells me similar stories about life at the hospital. You would think that when the stakes are literally life and death (she works on a cardiac unit), things might be different but no, it's the same familiar story, with a few twists.
In Canada, with our government funded healthcare system, ungodly amounts of money disappear into the black hole of a public hospital. But where does it all go? It's not to the staff, those actually providing patient care. They are getting run ragged. Nurse-to-patient ratios not met on a daily basis. Insufficient training. Burnout and staff turnover.
The money goes to the administrative class, which has become bloated and fat and completely untethered to the physical reality of the situation on the ground. Layer after layer of superfluous administators, drawing salaries far out of proportion to their actual contribution to the mission of patient health. Org charts that would make a Soviet bureaucrat blush. It is the same strain of the disease that has infected higher education, and government itself.
There is much work to be done in fighting this sickness. It starts with speaking honestly about the extent of the infection, and by a frank appraisal of which parts of the system are too far gone and need to be amputated.
