I have to say that when I first started working in this capacity that I worked with the longer term elderly and they were very entitled Jewish people and that was hard to deal with and my Jamaican manager was horrible. After a horrible altercation with her I moved to work with the patients on the ventilators and they were so sick they were appreciative of anything you would do for them. Helping someone get a lot better off—if not normal—makes me like my job. Basically, the healthier the patients the nastier they are to you.

The part that I didn’t like that made me hate my job was management and my boss and big boss were just horrible. To give you one example of normal interactions. I was reading the Invisible Man and Pam, the big boss, says to me, “Why would you read that,” and I told her, “I’ve thought about reading it for a long time and my boyfriend recommended it.”

She was a very manly looking black woman.

And she said, “I can’t picture you having a boyfriend that reads.”

She was the most socially inept person and was in a management position.

Deon wasn’t your typical BT1000, she was a very aloof, undercover Jamaican, not hot tempered and fly off the handle, but a complete lazy and crazy bitch. I never had a bad performance review and she started mine with saying, “We had high hopes for you, but you really let us down.”

She just got arrested for beating up her husband and had a restraining order on her. She made for a lot of good work commentary and inside jokes.

The department satisfaction surveys were really bad one year for the therapy department, so Pam decided she had to do something about it. Pam, the Big Boss, a very Dykey BT-900, she decides to do this team building activity and our homework was to get together with your teammates and build a pad to wrap around an egg so you can drop it out of a two-story window so it won’t break. So these overworked people are being asked to get together and save this egg from breaking. People did, very grudgingly and then when they got together to throw the eggs out the window, she bought them lunch and people were taking too long to eat so she told them if they wanted to finish their lunch they’d have to stay late. She then accused them of not doing their homework. They got rushed through the lunch being chastised and not being able to finish the lunch she bought for them.

The teams go up and some people have built parachutes and are discussing the best way to throw it out the window and she said, “I’m throwing them all out,” and she would hurl then hard. Anytime an egg survived she would get pissed.

At the end, after she viciously threw everyone’s eggs out the second story window, she put people in groups with facilitators to discuss the top four complaints, but they weren’t the top four items. She cherry picked the complaints to the ones that were not that serious, essentially building her own list. She always says super inappropriate things to people like:

To a rehab tech, a black woman, had started dating this guy and she had a picture of him and Pam said, “He looks like he should be in jail.”

Just what you say to your employee. Pam didn’t have much of a filter.