Are these really the people that should be required to work so much? Isn’t their job about handling life and death daily? Wouldn’t we want exactly these people to come fully rested to work every single day and be fully staffed?

I don’t know if there are jobs with similar stakes that are so carelessly staffed and disgustingly paid.

  • Apytele@sh.itjust.works
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    1 hour ago

    Most of them actually. Am a nurse and was once psychiatrically hospitalized alongside a train conductor and we really bonded over our ridiculous and yet supposedly “high reliability industry” jobs. She actually got hooked on speedballs because there’s some weird loophole in our state where the train conductors need to give something like 48–72h notice or something to take sick leave so most of them just show up for their 16h shifts fucked up on amphetamines to stay awake then benzos so the amphetamines don’t give them tachycardia and one of her managers actually basically gave her a pep talk on which doctors to go to and what to say to get them prescribed legally but given that they’re both extremely addictive substances her dosages spiraled wildly out of control extremely quickly such that she was only able to get effective doses extralegally. On the plus side though losing that job and getting shipped to the other end of the state just to find a bed got her away from both her dealer and her cartoonishly abusive ex (even a week into her stay the bruising was pretty wild). And then actually when I left the hospital my third time I met my now husband in partial although we lost touch for like a year until we ran into each other again and he helped me escape my much more subtly shitty relationship and actually graduate / get licensed (if you think nurse pay is shit I was getting paid $12.50 as a nursing assistant working with criminally insane men and that was after the promotion).