Pissing it away

I was down on the Costa na Déise last week mowing the lawn from the first time this hot dry grass-killing Summer. I noticed that the neighbour-across was out as well; painting his boundary wall. So I went and introduced myself: they've lived there more than  a year but it's the first time we've been on the street at the same time.  He's about my age and used to work as a paramedic in the UK. Indeed he spent 25 years of his life dealing with trauma: arriving on the scene by ambulance and even for a while by helicopter. God knows it was stressful and challenging but it was interesting and fulfilling and he vowed that he would jack it in when he stopped enjoying it. Things started to cloud over when he found that more and more of his working day was filling in forms and so less was available for actually relieving suffering and saving lives. The forms ensured that his boss's arse was covered if something went wrong ;and somebody somewhere else had a full-time job filing them in a cabinet bigger than the biggest ambulance.
[Aside from ROAR on bullshit jobs]:
""Right now nurses in New Zealand are on strike and one of their major issues is exactly that: on the one hand, their real wages have been declining, but on the other, they also find they are spending so much time filling out forms they can’t take care of their patients. It’s over 50 percent for many nurses.
The two problems are linked because of course all the money that would have otherwise been going to keep their wages up, are instead being diverted to hiring new and useless administrators who then burden them with even more bullshit to justify their own existence."" via MeFi here be counter-arguments.

Then he was transferred to a small University town. It seemed like every Friday and Saturday night, he would be called to take another student incapable through drink to the A&E. Then one evening after delivering a legless youngster to hospital he was called to a case of heart attack. He stabilised the patient and rushed back to A&E, only to find that there was no bed available; so he continued to watch and ward in the ambulance for another two hours. The bed was occupied by the young chap earlier who didn't know when to stop swilling pints. That was when it stopped being fun.

We agreed that a) we sounded like two old farts moaning about the Youth Of Today b) when we were young we'd both done foolish and potentially self-destructive things involving drink and/or cars. "I blame technology" the neighbour suggested, "in our day, we'd get home somehow; if not in our own weaving way then with the help of our pals. Kids now, they call 911 and get The Man to sort them out."

That reminded me of The Girl Who Invented Herself. When she lost her job in Germany and all her money in Brussels just before Christmas 1987, she came to stay with us. In the New Year she landed a job pulling pints and piling pizzas in the Student's Union. That conveniently evening work freed up the day for a Secretarial Course. Often and often at breakfast on the weekends, she'd report that when she had finished her shift at the bar, cashed up and locked the door, she'd find a student comatose in the flower-bed or slumped in a doorway with puke down his or her shirt. She'd go back into the Union and call for help again; when all she wanted, after 6 hours on her feet, was her bed. Sometimes she'd get really angry: what she could have done with a chance to go to college! You wouldn't find her pissing it all away in an alcoholic haze. And indeed nobody did. After a few years in London working in the office of a Danish construction company, she started a diploma then a degree under a day-release scheme. She is now Viceroy of Networks AsiaPac for Megacorp Telecoms in Singapore.

If I'm not exactly The Patriarchy (my beard isn't really sufficiently biblical), I do walk in a miasma of privilege. I had a very expensive education, for example; and my accent is at the snootier end of middle-class Southern British. Because of the accent and because I'm not black, in random encounters with the police, I tend not get barked at "place your hands on the bonnet with your feet apart". I took a year out after leaving school and worked in a hospital and for a publisher of primary school books. When I left home and country the following September, I had tried at least those two ways of making a living. I started classes in Trinity College Dublin thinking that learning was the main purpose for my being there. I knew students did other things as well - I joined the Film Society, for example, and started my love affair with Chabrol and Truffaut and subtitles; and I started another love affair as well with a real person - but learning was the axis around which these other activities rotated.  I wasn't totally clear about where I was going but I knew that flunking exams or failing to submit assignments were not wanted on the voyage. I also learned before I got to college that one pint can be lubricating; two pints impairs your judgement . . . often enough to believe that a third pint is a good idea. Like a rat in an operant conditioning cage I was able to associate four pints with a truly appalling sense of malaise the next morning: and so stopped going that far.