"He Loved his Work"

 

This article is partly an update on this one: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2025/02/beware-catheters.html. In this new article I'd like to explore more the psychology of the catheters and in doing so help you develop more skills for defending yourself from them. I'm particularly reminded of an incident in the early '90's when I was sent on overtime to the MRI- Magnetic Resonance Imager. Among my duties was to clean the scanning rooms after use. I remember that I had to leave my watch and mobile phone etc outside because of the powerful magnetic field in the chamber. It was a bit like cleaning Delivery Suite theatre, but much less visceral. I'll never forget the day when the senior porter, a man I'll call Jameel, approached me with a frown on his face. He said: "Ben, I've had some feedback from the MRI staff, they told me that since you joined the team they have noticed significant improvements." He then turned his back and strutted away. I breathed a sigh of relief. I had been worried that I was in trouble; it turned out I was. I suspect if my employers had known who I was and how I was going to work when I sat in an interview for hospital portering in October 1988, they would never have given me a job; not because I wasn't good enough, but because I was too good. If you are in the NHS, portering or civilian, and you do your job very well, I promise you will get one hell of a lot of aggravation, both from management and in your relationship with your colleagues. A few years afterwards I would experience this again in Theatres, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2017/07/odo.html. As I said in the Catheters article, there are numerous reasons why these people might do what they do, but I did not include motives that are there to see, but are truly baffling. It is not a good business model to punish staff members for being excessively proficient, but the NHS does. It would be bad enough if management did so through a form of unwritten policy, which of course they do; but it also operates tacitly via peer pressure. I truly fail to understand why. I have never felt any such urge when dealing with other people, whether in a professional or social setting. Up until he received this feedback Jameel had been a shy and distant character, happy to let me get on with what I do, enjoying the lightened workload this gave him, but after the feedback he turned into a true catheter. He hung round the MRI scanning suite like a vulture, watching me, poking his head round doors and monitoring every move I made continuously. He and some of the others would burst in almost every half hour and pull me up on something they believed I had done wrong. Like with the previous Theatres example they would demonstrate over and over again the "right way to do it", standing round me with their hands on their hips looking stern. They gave me tours of the chambers the other porters had cleaned, but when I looked I realized that these were not as clean as the ones I had done. Nevertheless, they had been done "right!" while mine had been done "wrong!" Those other chambers had been caressed by the magic hands of mediocrity, so there! It took me a while to realize that my colleagues were trying to persuade me to do my job less well, but they didn't want to say it. This game of silly buggers reached its ultimate nadir when they took photographs of a chamber I had supposedly just done and showed it to me as an example of how I had made numerous mistakes. I soon found out that they had taken those images before I had cleaned, not after; but they all lied to me together. I then told the head porter I did not want any more overtime on the MRI cleaning team. Thank goodness I had never joined them fulltime!

It's amazing to think that such bizarre gaslighting must have involved collusion. At some point Jameel and the other porters must have sat down in a quiet corner and plotted to manipulate and deceive me. The ODO business can be explained as subconscious, an "open secret", so to speak. Maybe even the topping up scam they tried on me in DS could too, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/02/lets-just-help-each-other-out.html. If ever caught in a corner and forced to explain why they did it, those DS or theatre porters probably couldn't. They would not be able to put their intention into words. The MRI situation involved the fabrication of actual data. Conversations like that are utterly unthinkable, but they must go on. I'm reminded of a scene in Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist where one of the character laments about how their home has been attacked by the local council and workmen have filled the toilet bowls with cement; "People did this! People!", see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2020/10/tree-felled-for-hs2.html. Obviously if I had been somebody else on the team I would never have done such a thing and would have warned the target about what was coming. Was the fact that I felt such pride and dignity in being a HP the very thing that generated this hostility in others? Turning again to 20th century literature: The novel The Fountainhead really struck a chord with me. It is by the Russian-American philosopher and author Ayn Rand. It is less famous than her final epic Atlas Shrugged, but perhaps deserves to be considered her masterpiece. The story follows the lives of two young architects, Howard and Peter. Peter is very conventional and does all the ordinary things in order to be successful, but Howard is a passionate maverick and decides to train under a shunned outsider called Henry Cameron. Cameron is hated by his fellow architects despite the fact that he is a genius. I'll never forget the passage in the book where he is described. The narrator gives a long list of his professional qualities and ends with the words: "...but Henry Cameron made a mistake, he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost." Am I like Henry? Did my brother porters really despise me because I loved my work? Have you, whether HP or civilian, had a similar experience to mine?