Beware the Catheters!

 

During your service as a hospital porter, if take your job as seriously as it should be, it is not just the ravages of management incompetence and malevolence you will have to deal with. Some of your colleagues will also try to take advantage of you, both portering and civilian. They have various motives for doing so. Sometimes it is for profit, in terms of manipulating you into taking on more than your fair share of the workload. Some will do it just to make themselves look good in front of others; sometimes it just makes them feel good, giving them a sense of personal power. I've discussed examples previously, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/02/lets-just-help-each-other-out.html. Very often you will be blamed for problems that are not your fault. The reason for this is because you are diligent and reasonable and therefore it is simply easier and quicker to blame you than to take the real culprit to task when all he will do is whine and grumble back. Always be honest, if something is your fault then admit it and apologize; but if it is not then stand your ground like a giant statue. A bit of friendly pranking and ribbing is inevitable in portering because it is an almost exclusively male environment, but some lodge behaviour can cross a line into something more serious. I call problem HP's of this type "catheters", because they take the piss.

Another example happened when I was being trained for theatres and the other theatre porters were teaching me how to use a floor scrubber and "sucker", a vacuum cleaner capable of handling wet material. The scrubber is a machine with a rotating plate on the bottom onto which a brush or abrasive pad it fitted which we use to clean the floors of the operating theatres. I was already familiar with the scrubber and sucker because I'd used them in Delivery Suite, although those were a slightly different design, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/02/delivery-suite.html. After showing me how to operate the machines the other theatre porters left me alone to clean a trauma theatre, but minutes later they came rushing back in. "What are you doing, Ben!?" demanded the deputy senior, an alcoholic named Monty (not his real name; and calling him an alcoholic doesn't exactly narrow it down much either). Two other porters were with him watching.  "Eh?" I replied. "You're doing it wrong! Look." Monty snatched the control handle from my grip and switched it on. "Do it this way... watch." He scrubbed a pair of lanes across the floor and then handed it back to me. I carried on, but he instantly stopped me again. "No, no no! Can't you get it right?" Monty once again took the scrubber and demonstrated for me. I was baffled because I couldn't see any difference between how he was doing it and I was; and I said so. I asked him to be more specific, but he just said: "Watch!" We went through this process about five times before Monty was satisfied that I was scrubbing the floor correctly and left me in peace to get on with it. It was only much later that I realized what that conversation was really about. Monty was showing off his expertise and authority in front of the two other porters by aggressively correcting me, even though there was nothing to correct. He was gaslighting me. I was already using the machine properly. The whole thing was a charade; Monty was posing for the two other porters and using me to do so. I could give you numerous other examples of this being done to me. I was too young and naive at the time to understand at first, but later on I learned. Just because I don't want to put others down doesn't mean that some others don't want to do it to me. One thing I've never even considered doing is using a dignity statement against a brother porter, but if there is any time I might have considered it, it was having to fight back against the catheters.