They make it seem like anybody can be a nurse or work in a hospital. I'm the only woman in my immediate family not working in healthcare, two are nurses and one is in housekeeping while my grandmother was also a nurse and it really isn't a job just anybody can do. You have to be empathetic and you have to be okay with getting shit on yourself. Not only that you have to go on break and share stories about said shit while laughing so hard you cry, it's the only way to survive. I still remember when I was a kid and my mom took me up to her floor to check her schedule. We ended up packed in this elevator and my head was at the exact height of a stretcher this paralyzed man was laying on. He stared at me drooling with the saddest look on his face and I know adults who couldn't handle that situation. My mom works in palliative care and I remember her saying after she returns from sick leave that every patient was different. A woman I used to work with mentioned that you have to be a pretty special type of person to be able to work there after she told me her husband passed away there but before I mentioned my mom worked there. Not everybody can work somewhere for probably about 30 years where people die constantly.
It's pretty much the premise of Undercover Boss. Except the serfs don't get to see how comparatively easy the King's job is. And they get in that little sops for proles moment where the magnificent benefactor makes a one-time gift to a single employee to correct the single instance of inequality exposed by the system so we all feel okay about our rising plutocracy. That's the dirty little secret of the Soviet Revolution: the Tsars weren't taken out by intellectuals, they were taken out by thugs who, on balance, didn't do an appreciably worse job than the royals. http://www.gq.com/story/amber-waves-of-green-jon-ronson-gq-july-2012I approached Wayne, as he's known, for wholly mathematical reasons. I'd worked out that there are six degrees of economic separation between a guy making ten bucks an hour and a Forbes billionaire, if you multiply each person's income by five. So I decided to journey across America to meet one representative of each multiple. By connecting these income brackets to actual people, I hoped to understand how money shapes their lives—and the life of the country—at a moment when the gap between rich and poor is such a combustible issue. Everyone in this story, then, makes roughly five times more than the last person makes. There's a dishwasher in Miami with an unbelievably stressful life, some nice middle-class Iowans with quite difficult lives, me with a perfectly fine if frequently anxiety-inducing life, a millionaire with an annoyingly happy life, a multimillionaire with a stunningly amazing life, and then, finally, at the summit, this great American eagle, Wayne, who tells me he's "pissed off" right now.
If there's one thing I've figured out in my almost 10 years of working it's that people get promoted because they suck at their current job and the one a step up is more straight forward so requires less on your feet thinking/problem solving. When I was a housekeeper my supervisor couldn't Windex for fucks sake. Unless you get lucky and work in a restaurant were upper management still understands the industry your mind will be blown everyday by the choices the suits make. Not to mention the abuse people put up with that management has absolutely no understanding of because they never have to deal with it. Once when I was a cashier in school I was working on a Saturday and this old man, completely unprovoked laughed at me then said, " I bet you wish you listened to your parents now when they told you to stay in school." Suits will never have to deal with that and they never could.