I did retirement home training and used to think it was a sweet job. Then I got in the business and underestimated how demoralizing it was as they give you the easy elders in training while the others make you, or at least me, really think of the fact the job just amounts to an unkarmic freebie.
I often feel the same working in mental health, especially with medically complex patients who have lost their own legal-medical decision making rights.
There’s the obvious high stakes ethical debates like if someone has a gangrenous limb that will kill them should you force them to have it removed. But there’s a lot more common / lower stakes examples I run into more often. Say someone has a dietary restriction that not following will likely cause great harm. Say they can’t swallow effectively (more common than you think, especially with strokes). This person is demanding a burger. It’s more likely than not that they will choke and die on that burger. Do you let them have the burger? You could argue that a sane person would obviously choose life over a burger but I might argue that American culture in particular makes the ability to
consume burgersenjoy life more important than lengthening it (not entirely true, OP is probably one of the few people here who wouldn’t be shocked what people put elders through in the name of extending life). In the end its a complex debate with a huge amount of individual nuance that I don’t claim to have all the answers to.I can tell you that I kinda wanna go work hospice where I don’t even have to ask any of those questions and can just give them the fucking burger.
Landlords. Do I think it’s terrible for some nice old person to rent their basement to students for a good price for a bit of income in retirement? No. But corporate landlords and people hoarding housing can fuck off.
Software Patent Attorney
Any sort of high pressure sales sucks.
How much do you hate them?
Name a number!
How about if I drop that hatred by 22% with a 2.1% financing? And throw in a free coupon to Chili’s if you verify within the next 45 minutes! Hurry act now we’re running low on coupons. And you don’t want to go home empty handed, do you?
Car sales person.
Human Cannonball
Hear me out: Many circus performers are multi disciplined, or put on an incredible display of training and talent. The last big top I went to had a knife throwing couple who also did a fantastic roller skating routine, a few very talented clowns/jugglers, and a bike troupe in a ball of death. Just to name a few. These people have devoted days or years of their lives to their craft. Do you know how hard it is to ride a bicycle across a tight rope with someone on your shoulders?
The Human Cannonball? He got launched out of the cannon and did one flip before getting caught by the net. That’s all he did that night, yet he came out and bowed with the rest of the performers like he was an equal contributor.
The Human Cannonball? He got launched out of the cannon and did one flip before getting caught by the net.
That’s what it looks like to the untrained eye. But they’re not really going to fire a person out of a cannon. That’s not safe. So he just huddles in the cannon, they light a decoy fuse, it makes a bang (with no projectile), and he spring out and jumps that distance by himself. Requires a lot of core and leg strength.
This is equal parts so silly and so possible that I have no idea if this comment is a joke (I’ve never been to a circus)
Really, there’s no launching mechanism at all?
There is a launch pad thing using springs or compressed air to give them a boost or they wouldn’t go as far.
The explosion is just for sound, and it is funny if the timing is off.
Time share salesman
Cold callers for: Solar panel, and Business loans
Whoever is in charge o blackrock
Advertiser
This. “Marketing” is just a euphemism for “propaganda” – it is inherently manipulative and therefore evil.
I once saw a video report on bullshit jobs, where they also interviewed a researcher into how much value is gained or destroyed by various professions.
They said that for every £1 (the researchers worked in the UK) given to marketing executives, that society suffered £11 in lost value.
Mad Men was hard for me to keep up with because I just hated everyone and it made me angry
That shit should be illegal, with like a living whitelist so you can still put out a sandwich board in front of your restaurant.
Yes, I know that will implode entire sectors. They deserve it.
There’s a city in France - Toulouse, IIRC - where the mayor ran on a promise that “if you elect me, I’ll remove all the billboards.” Turns out that was really popular, so now that city does not have any billboards.
Dope.
There’s a good next pet issue for me once over-restrictive zoning is gone and dead. I guess public transit is a perennial bee to put in my bonnet, too.
I cannot for the life of me understand why billboards are legal in general. We’ve gone through the effort of banning distractions like even touching your phone while you’re driving, which makes sense, but yet these massive advertisements who’s literal sole intention and purpose is to get you to look at it instead of the road exist and are everywhere. They’re also complete eyesores. Why?! It surprises me there hasn’t been more campaigns like that, I can’t imagine billboards are exactly a popular idea
Telephone sanitizers
You’ll be sorry when they’re gone!
Found the Golgafrincham.
Come on now. We all know it is a euphemism.
HR. Have never met anyone in HR who contributed to the good.
Company stooges seems a more appropriate department title than human resources, also who the fuck wants to be called a resource I’m a human being not a number.
Especially Toby
HR only contributes to the good of the business, which is owned by the capitalist class. It’s a class war, and HR is not on the side of the working class.
Since when are HR working class?
And you don’t even need to bring class into it, their role is the same even when the employees aren’t working class either.
HR employees must sell their labor for wages to survive, because they don’t own the means of production; therefore they are working class. The capitalist class makes money by owning the means of production, and exploiting the labor of the working class.
Somewhat agree. The good ones you’d never know exist until you need help. They are a god send. Fuck the rest of them
That’s because you only ever dealt with them from the employee’s side. They contribute to the good of the company/organization. Sometimes that also means good for the employee, but that’s just coincidence.
I think it’s because they use their position to professionalise a bullshit job, presenting it as a field (HR Management), when their skills are rather ordinary. Really, they should be doing payroll and employment admin, not setting the tone for the organisation or being seen as specialists in any meaningful way. Also, job competencies and profiles disproportionality reward the “skills” found in HR, which i think reflects their input in designing these tools and templates.
Further, i find people who work in this field to have quite a high opinion of themselves and their usefulness.
Private equity/venture capitalists - they acquire unique brands and then extract all the value and enshitify them into the ground
Vulture capitalists.
I’m morbidly curious at how that happens/works
One of the reasons Boeing sucks is this. First reason is McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeings money, hallowed out the soul that built the world’s greatest aircraft, then sold what was left off to the big investment funds. Then the investment funds were like “look at all this money Boeing is spending on safety and suppliers” so they cut out the safety and bought out the suppliers. The horror stories of quality control at some of the suppliers is just as bad if not worse than some of the horror stories of quality control at Boeing. What if I told you Boeing fought to have ECS (environmental control systems) software that was written by third world “programmers” that didn’t speak English to remain on their aircraft illegally, claiming it didn’t pose a threat to safety, you know those systems that determine if there is enough oxygen to breath at altitude and whether the temperature inside the plane is survivable…
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
private equity investment firms
Lobbyists
Well, lobbyists work not only for evil corpos, but also for NGOs and movements… Lobbyism is the process to sway politics to a direction through interpersonal meetings, and is necessarily in a democracy.
However, one thing that would benefit the US is transparency around lobbyists; who they are, how they are funded, their agenda etc. The EU has a database on registered lobbyists and the transparency helps with parts of the problem.
This needs higher up. Lobbyists are a cancer
If you’re saying that you uniquely oppose the existence of elder care as an occupation, then that is a very strange, and frankly worrisome example. Am I misinterpreting what you meant? Also, I don’t know what to make of “unkarmic freebie.”
Having known some people in elder care, the reality is that some old people are nasty, brutish, mean, racist, misogynist, creepy, violent, you fucking name it, there’s some old person you’re going to have to take care of who matches that horrible personality. You’re paid the same whether you’re helping someone you like or someone who is rude and assaults you every time you enter the room.
I agree with you, elder care should still exist, but I can see why some people get tired of taking care of terrible old people who were likely terrible people all their lives and who are just allowed abuse you. Why are they allowed to abuse you? Because most people who do elder care and underpaid, overworked, and don’t have a lot of other options that pay nearly as well. Basically you’re accepting middling but better than fast-food pay to have abuse dumped on you. I can see how someone feels like its a karmic freebie because there’s no responsibility in any of it, generally management won’t do anything about “problem elders.” Get to be a fucking asshole your whole life and then get to be a fucking asshole to the person wiping your ass before you die.
I have a similar story from another friend who ended up at a mental health hospital in a violent youth ward. He was underpaid, overworked, and responsible for about 30 violent and dangerous kids with unstable mental health issues that made them difficult to approach. If he was busy helping one kid take their meds, and another kid on the ward was in the same moment trying to take their own life and succeeded, he would be the one responsible. He was not being paid enough or had enough support to justify taking full responsibility for things that are outside his control when he cannot magically manage 30 dangerous cases at once. He left the job after two months of assaults and scares. I don’t blame him, and he doesn’t blame himself, and we also understand that those 30 cases deserve better care than they’re getting but it’s not his responsibility as an individual to make up for the shortcomings of government funding for this.
Same with people who work elder care. It’s not their individual responsibility to make up for the fact that these companies don’t give a damn about the people they’re caring for, and each elder is just an income stream in a database. The number of people I know in elder care who now have permanent back problems because they’re being expected to lift 300lb old people off their beds and they’re not being given proper equipment for it is too damn high. These people do not deserve to have their bodies broken and paid pennies on the dollar to be abused by the elders in their care, not given the right tools to do the job, with a prevailing attitude of “they’re just old people, how bad can they hurt you really?” Pretty fucking bad, shockingly.
Elder care needs to exist. Does it need to exist as it exists now in the USA? Abso-fucking-lutely not.
In the kids case, that’s a staffing issue. Most lockdown mental health facilities have a tech/CNA whose sole job it is to walk around and log the location and state of every patient every 9-15min, depending on policy. In addition to the techs/CNAs who herd everyone to group, meals, and all the rest. In addition to mental health staff that run the groups. In addition to nurses who do meds and assessments. In addition to “orderlies”, not big men in white like in movies, who tackle people these days, but people with intense training in deescalation.
.
In the elder case, that is often a staffing issue. If it’s day shift and you have more than 6 residents assigned to you, that’s a staffing and/or state level regulation issue. If it’s evening shift and you have more than 8 residents assigned to you, that’s a staffing and/or state regulation issue. But yes, declining mental health (dementia) and brain deterioration (Alzheimer’s) is part of elder care. Sometimes it’s the sole reason they’re placed in a home, because that decline in brain capacity requires 24h care.
.
A lot of health care jobs would be absolutely ok if they were actually safe for both patients and staff. But corporate greed often doesn’t allow for that.
Staffing matters. And it often will be ignored until the state mandates a law that requires the corporate owners to do better.
Tip:
you can replace your periods with three dashes to get a horizontal separator, which I think is what you were going for. It’s markdown syntax, it should work for most clients.Spaces between paragraphs don’t really show on Memmy and walls of text suck.
Whatever works, I’ll try it.
Spaces between paragraphs should work, you have to use two new lines for them.
They seem to work on my instance’s web interface and on Jerboa…
