Serial Releavers

 

Of all the stereotypical hospital portering characters that I have identified, the serial releaver is the only one I really cannot understand. A serial releaver is a HP who basically spends his entire working life in HPing, but every so often, usually two or three times a decade, he will leave portering for another job, most often outside healthcare entirely; and then return after anything from a few weeks to a couple of months. This behaviour makes no sense to me. They gain nothing from it. Leaving the NHS can sometimes be a one-way ticket, even if you don't get dismissed like I was. It is something that should never be taken on lightly. You run the risk of not being allowed back in. You might think "but I'm a good worker; they'll always take me back." That is a very naive thing to say. The NHS does not care how good or bad you are at your job, as I have explained before, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2016/12/nurse-sacked-for-praying.html. If you are turned down for recruitment after reapplying then it will probably be because you have made a personal enemy of somebody in authority; and who doesn't ever do that? I have known a few serial releavers who were blocked from rejoining because of this. Another disadvantage is that you break your service and therefore lose all your long service benefits and pay increments. You have to start again at the bottom from scratch. So why are so many porters serial releavers? I suspect it may simply be virtue signalling at convention. Peer pressure is one of the most powerful forces in most people's lives. Because HP's are not supposed to love our work, some of us feel obliged to make gestures to show other people we do not... even if we do. I notice that serial releavers also engineer other persona displays along these lines. They say things to me like "a job's just a job, mate"; and they also tell everybody all the time that they are going to leave and that they are looking for other work, even right in the middle of the HPing phase of their releaving cycle. One Delivery Suite porter I remember used to leave a newspaper on the lodge table open at the jobs ads page whenever he went off duty. He clearly wanted to drop hints to the next shift about what his intentions were, or supposed intentions. That is frustrating and tragic. If they are attached to the Hospital Portering Service then why not just admit it, like I do, and stay in it permanently?