Topic: The Worst Job I Ever Had

My worst job ever was the one I got right after graduating college. After farting around for 10 years in various colleges while pursuing a career as a professional musician I finally realized that I’d never make it in that field. I had spent a semester in Belmont College in Nashville studying music business and saw an enormous number of drummers way better than me who couldn’t get a job. I had always secretly wanted to be a doctor but when at this point I asked about the possibility of medical school a doctor said, “Your transcript looks like a checkerboard - I mean, you’ve been to five different colleges over 10 years so there’s no way you’d get in!” 

Thus I decided to finish college with a B.S. in Medical Technology. Medical Technologists work in hospital and clinical laboratories - analyzing blood, typing and crossmatching blood, growing and testing microbiological specimens and so on. So since I had always focused on science courses in college up to this point I figured the fastest way to actually graduate & find a job utilizing my accumulated college credits was to go the Med Tech route. 

I got accepted to a medical technology internship at our local hospital. It was a very intense year. The very first day they taught us how to draw blood. I had no idea something like that was part of the job and it sort of freaked me out but I did eventually become pretty good at it, through sheer repetition. In the didactic and clinical sessions we learned urinalysis, clinical biochemistry, blood banking, microbiology and hematology - in short, how to look for anything a doctor might order on blood or urine or stool or any other biological fluid. And we learned how to operate and maintain all the different clinical analyzers.

The day I graduated a friend and I went to Florida. While we were there I decided to look for a job. I thought it would be awesome to live in Florida, in the warm weather and near the beaches and so on. I answered an ad in a local Daytona paper for a med tech job in a little town called Inverness. It was about halfway between Tampa and Ocala. It was a night shift position but since I really needed a job I thought I couldn’t be too choosy. I went for an interview and to my astonishment I was offered the job right away.

I moved down to Inverness a couple of weeks later and was basically thrown in the deep end. There was very little in the way of orientation and I had to just sort of learn as I went. And I was painfully insecure, I had fantastic theoretical knowledge but I had a very hard time actually applying what I knew. It was an insanely busy lab as well, especially on nights. The doctors all wanted their patients lab results on the charts by 7 AM, when they rounded. There were so many patients whose blood we had to draw that in order to get their labs finished and onto the charts on time we had to go out and begin collecting the specimens at midnight. Then doctors would call and bitch us out for waking their patients up so early! 

And the lab equipment at this hospital was somewhat old and finicky. In particular there was a chemistry analyzer called a Gilford that I could count on to screw up every morning right when I was at my busiest. And I’d have to intermittently drop everything I was doing to run to the ER and collect STAT labs. Plus my chemistry supervisor was this appallingly supercilious and immensely annoying person who claimed she NEVER made a mistake and was always on my case about something.

It turned out that I just couldn’t get used to working third shift either. I never could figure out whether to go right to bed when I got off, or wait and time my sleep so that I’d be getting up right before time to go in.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was an episode one night when I was drawing blood on this extremely large lady. I had to lean over her awkwardly to get to her arm because she refused to roll off of her side. She farted right in my face and I decided right then and there that I wasn’t getting paid enough to put up with all the stress of this job.

I found a job close to my hometown and very happily gave my two weeks notice. I took great pleasure in the fact that the chemistry supervisor was going to have to actually work now because my departure left them so short staffed. But once on my new job I discovered that it too had its own plethora of stressors. So I learned that the grass really isn’t greener on the other side of the fence. 

But it turns out that the doctor who advised me not to apply to medical school was wrong, as I’ve been a doctor for over 20 years now. I was working in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia when the first Desert Storm misadventure took place in 1990 and as the SCUD missiles were raining in I decided my job security was pretty shaky. So I bought textbooks on organic chemistry, biology, analytical chemistry and physics, studied them for a year to prepare for the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test), took the MCAT, applied to med school and got accepted. It turned out that philosophies had changed and by the time I applied the med schools were looking for candidates with more varied life experiences. People may still fart in my face but at least now I’m making about 10 times as much so I just smile and hold my breath!