Downtime Guilt

 

I've had an angst-filled letter from a brother porter at a UK hospital, one I count among my valued readers of the HPWA and listeners of The Gas Spanner. He is unfortunate enough to have a management team whose understanding and experience of hospitals is nonexistent. He was in the lodge with some of his fellow porters one day when a manager walked in and asked them in a demeaning tone: "Don't you chaps have any work to do?" As I read this I rolled my eyes and groaned. What the manager was objecting to was what is known as "downtime", something we porters more often call "between jobs". In hospitals, our workload is unpredictable by its very nature. The number of porters you have on a shift is not the number you need to carry out all the particular tasks at a particular period of time, for that is impossible; it is the number you need to do whatever is required of us at the maximum estimated workload rate for the entire shift. In fact it is sometimes necessary to call in supernumerary staff for a situation like a major incident. It's not like a factory where there are orders and schedules for everything that allows us to plan in advance. The inevitable result is that for certain time periods we will have no work to do. Anybody with any knowledge at all about HPing would realize this. Anybody who asks such a stupid and insulting question to porters between jobs has no such knowledge. Maybe it's a sign on the times. During the last few decades, management has changed from being a role given to people within an organization with the right skills and experience, to a separate profession in itself. Head porters and other administration staff are more often parachuted in from business school or polytechnics than being promoted seniors or supervisors. We can spot them a mile off; they are usually very young, very smartly dressed and as thick as sluice water. They are the people most likely to become "good idea fairies", see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/01/good-idea-fairies.html. They also hate being called head porters, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/08/sometime-in-themid-90s-i-had-rather.html. This stupidity is not as recent as you might think; in fact an old porter once told me there was a blockhead at the Churchill in the '60's with a bee in his bonnet about portering downtime. He had all sorts of hatchling insights which he was sure would to "solve!" the "problem!" like cutting the postroom staff down to delivery only and making the lodge porters sort the mail between jobs. How the mail was supposed to be sorted during busy shifts had not occurred to the solitary cerebral neuron he used to think with. In some hospitals they have even tried to abolish the lodge altogether. The "new lodge" at the JRH appears to be specifically geared to be a transitional phase leading to that kind of future, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/08/new-lodge.html. I've seen porters standing in a line outside the lodge door and even sitting on the floor. What is really horrid is that management appear to be trying to manipulate the porters emotionally. They want us to feel "downtime guilt" whenever we are between jobs. They do this by making changes to the lodges such as less comfortable chairs, removing privileges such as TV sets, kettles and microwave ovens, and the aforementioned visits from desk warriors to ask snide and sarcastic questions. Do they really think that if they inject some kind of whip-cracking negative incentive we will somehow overcome this appalling laziness baked into our portering bones? A laziness that magically disappears whenever we enter a busy workload period... coincidentally!