19 Jun 2024
Laura Bill has had enough. and she’s not afraid to tell us why.
If you’re looking for a day-brightener that will put a double-espresso type spring in your step then I’m sorry to disappoint you but…you might want to turn away now…(That isn’t a tip I learnt at Press Association, in case you were wondering!)
I’ve been privately ranting about this for a while and I am absolutely convinced it is really a thing. It was always somewhat true. My grandma used to cheerfully say, “I’m glad I’m on the way out and not on the way in”, and shake her head at useless systems back in the ‘90s and I often wonder what she would be saying about the state of things nowadays.
Can anybody actually do a decent job anymore? Has laziness become the norm among the middle-classes? Are more and more professionals just smiling patronisingly behind their lanyards, evidently desperate to get home to their happy, comfortable and probably lucrative lives?
I mention money there because to me, there is a lack of gusto and empathy in the workplace professions which should be brimming with gusto and empathy. The ones where they are in charge of lives, for example, be it animals or humans.
It happened just the other day. Animal at vet. For fleas that just will not go away and would probably survive a nuclear explosion. We have tried everything. Vet all smiley and lovely. Asks a thousand questions none of which are related to why we are there. I say: “Can we just concentrate on the fleas please?”
She looks really uncomfortable. Places her hand on her back/neck area and parts the fur… ugh… crawling horrid red- blood coloured little mites. Then she puts the fur back and returns her comb to her carry case.
Surely, a little brush of the visible ones would have been the thing to do?!
I raise the matter but I get lots of smiling and a talk about how we “aren’t going to be able to get rid of them all now”. Which obviously I knew. But it didn’t feel very well-beingish to see them and not remove them, not even to make a vague attempt at combing them off. It would have taken seconds.
On the same day my friend tells me they’ve had a pharmacist so horizontal that he can barely explain that most of the very urgent medications on a prescription are not at said chemists and he has no idea when or if they will be.
Medicine for a four-year-old is surely quite worthy of a bit of professionalism by a pharmacist, you’d think.
You’ve got one job, right? To issue medication.
How hard can it really be to properly explain if you don’t have it in stock?
I go into a café where one cake costs around a fiver. The woman snaps at me that she is about to close. Surely all those cakes are about to be tossed into a bin bag yet here I am with my purse in hand? Would it not make more business sense to be a bit friendlier? Of course it would.
After requesting an electronic link to book an appointment, the GP receptionist texted me a link for one specific Saturday appointment rather than the actual booking system from a no-reply text address so I could not even go back and point out the mistake. The consequence of her error means I couldn’t book an important cancer check. Annoying.
She’s probably then gone home for tea with her grandchildren and forgotten all about the incompetence which has caused me quite a lot of stress.
It seems it has become more important to just smile and be “polite” in that classically British way than it has to actually get your job done. And I really do not think that is conducive to a decent standard of living. It certainly isn’t polite is it? To let people down, leave people in a state of not-knowing, not take people’s lives and health seriously. Not polite at all.
A friend of mine is seeing a psychiatrist for her 15-year-old son and the appointment for antipsychotic medication was pre-empted with the phrase, “I’m on annual leave
next week so I can’t do anything for a month”. What?! If she replied with “I don’t give a shit about your all-inclusive to Hawaii, I just want the voices in my son’s head to go away,” she would have been made out to be the one in the wrong here. When it would have been totally justified. I think partly why I find it so frustrating and shocking is that I am reliable. If I say I will do something I do it properly. If I say I will get back to somebody or send somebody an email link I do it and I do it fully and correctly. I do not grin and nod and do half a job.
I don’t know if this lanyard generation is a result of the pandemic, this laissez-faire, doesn’t-really-matter-that-much attitude to professionalism. But I do know is that it is bloody annoying and I’m definitely not the only one who has noticed it.
