May Day last Friday. Had an enjoyable chat with my surgeon this morning comparing horrible low paid jobs we had as students. Student loans and debt hadn’t been invented in those days. It was lucky we found something to talk about after his first rant about idiotic cyclists in general, and the one who wobbled in front of his car when he was trying to drive to work this morning in particular, turned out not to be a fruitful conversational gambit when the cyclist in question was revealed as me.
His pick was his job planting ten thousand raspberry bushes, which he was able to demonstrate with a charade so cunning it impressed all onlookers. It certainly looked like backbreaking work, and he confirmed it was far worse than the grave digging job he’d had the previous summer.
I was the winner, though, with my story of the holiday work I got as a hospital aide in a psycho geriatric ward. My job was to do the horrible thankless but low skilled tasks the regular nurses didn’t want – one of which was putting suppositories into the bottoms of the bedridden old men, and then cleaning up the results that followed. These men were demented and immobile, but also invariably terribly grumpy. To keep them sweet I used to sing World War Two songs to them while I worked: “It’s a long way to Tipperary”, “Roll out the barrel!”, “We’ll meet again”. They would have all been young men in the war so I thought it would appeal to them. I do seem to remember some of them gurning in their toothless way, and trying to tunelessly sing along. It was awful, but maybe character forming if I’m being optimistic. Certainly nappy changes for my own children held no fears for me. Placing urodomes was another psychologically scarring part of my job (they’re like condoms but with a hole at the end to drain urine, for men who are incontinent), but I’m just going to gloss over that.
Nurses: shit job, shit pay. Once all this COVID nonsense is over, I hope they all get a pay rise.