With a capital “T”.
I have been summonsed to the office of the 2IC in our department.
It all started last Friday, when I discovered that there were no plans in place for our weekly departmental newsletter to be prepared and sent out, as all the active editors were away. In my day, someone would have been nominated to take care of it before Friday came around, but unfortunately I am no longer an active editor. I’ve been moved sideways, back into scheduling, for the good of the department.
However, the newsletter is still my baby, and I didn’t want to see it fall over. If it isn’t seen as reliable, then people will go back to mass departmental emails as a method of spreading information, which is just what we’re trying to get away from. The newsletter was 90% done, and just needed last minute submissions put in and a bit of polishing before sending it out. Unfortunately, the editor who had done most of the work so far had not exited Word properly, and when I tried to open the file, it was locked for editing. I discovered later that there’s a way around this, but I didn’t know that at the time. In the end I managed to get the editor to pull over to the side of the road on her drive up the coast, reopen the file and exit it correctly. In the meantime, though, the publishing deadline had come and gone, and I was feeling more and more stressed. Not realising I’d be doing the newsletter that day, I hadn’t prepared anything for the editorial either – it’s normally something that takes at least a little thought over the previous week. In the end, I scribbled something off at high speed, talking about a couple of events in the previous week. The first was the private hospital closing the previous Sunday as they had no patients – something I failed to realise when I came to do a ward road that evening and found the place like the Marie Celeste. This while the public hospital down the road was groaning at the seams at 150% capacity, and cancelling surgery because they had nowhere to put people. But talking about that wasn’t the thing that got me into trouble. I made a throw away comment abut the fact that on Tuesday, the duty anaesthetist never came into my theatre even once all day, so that I never got any sort of break during my six hour case, no lunch, no coffee break, not even time for a wee. And it was that comment that has come back to bite me.
The deputy HOD tells me I’ve been getting increasingly close to the line recently, and have definitely overstepped it this time. There is apparently a very unhappy colleague who she says was the subject of my ‘rant’ the other day. This is serious, in fact. This sort of conduct issue is looked upon very poorly in employment situations. Plus, the colleague in this instance is a real sweetie and a great favourite in the department. So, I feel terrible to have upset her, but it also means I’m going to get very little sympathy from anyone else for being a bitch to her. It’s like kicking a puppy.
My first instinct was of course to resign in a fit of pique. But is this really the hill I want to die on? No it isn’t. I suspect I’m going to have to suck it up, apologize to everyone, and promise to be more careful in future. Note, no gratitude at all for stepping up, and filling a need when I saw it.