A Short-lived Endeavor

Rosie knows all about women in technology positions.
She probably had to put up with this crap too.

The word of the day, according to Dictionary.com, is "sojourn", meaning a temporary stay or residency. I find this word to be particularly ideal for this day.

Today is the day I'm definitely certain (for real, for real) that my current job is not for me. Like Techkat, and millions of other folks our age, I work with computers for a living. More specifically, I work in hospitals, teaching nurses to use the new programs required for them to do their jobs. My own (however temporary) sojourn has already been a lengthy 4 months in the works, and my contract to stay 6 months ends in a seemingly paltry 6 weeks. Oh, I'm so ready.

I'm fascinated by the concept of learning. I love teaching others to love technology. But at a hospital where many of the nurses are well over 50 years old, many of them immigrants, this is as big a chore as any. It's one thing to teach a new program to people who've used computers before, but it's another thing entirely to have to take such baby steps as teaching someone to double-click, to use Xes to close windows, to right click a particular location. Not that I mind that so much.

Really, the factor that makes my stay at this particular company so unbearable is the way people in my position are treated. We're not nurses, so we're not union. Our schedule is changed on a near-daily basis. We are made to sign and re-sign contracts. We are yelled at for the most mundane of things like sitting ("You're taking a chair away from a nurse!"), checking the news ("Unprofessional behavior"), reading ("pay closer attention to the users!"). These things would all make a lot more sense, if we actually had anything to do in the first place.

The real problem is that our stint at any given location is about 8 weeks longer than we're really needed. We're left with 4 weeks before the nurses use the program -- when they don't want to learn -- and 4 weeks after they've mastered it and don't ask any more questions. Those two busy weeks in between, it's perfectly plausible for a person in our occupation to go an entire 8 hour shift without sitting, without using a computer on our own, without going bored/crazy out of our minds. But in those calm periods? Oh, it's just asking for trouble.

Today, I actually got in trouble for talking to a nurse. I wish I was joking. Although my time at this particular hospital is nearly over, I WILL miss the nurses I've worked with. It's interesting to find a profession that requires delicacy, knowledge, know-how and strength so completely dominated by females.

In the technology sector, women are a rare sight indeed. On my own shift, in my department, there are only two women (myself included) and at least eight men. And true to patterns that have proven themselves my whole life, I constantly struggle to keep users' attentions when the men are around. As the louder, and generally more aggressive gender, they easily talk over me, take my space and redirect other people's comments. While I'm not particularly interested in their ploys for power, I DO want to be taken seriously, and for that, I think it is at times necessary for a woman to summon up the courage to act like a man.

While I won't be looking at sporty cars any time soon, or peeing standing up, I DO aggressively approach problems I face at work. I tell people when I have an issue instead of trying to hide it like I normally would. I try to fix problems that we're not expected to fix (hardware issues are perfectly within my realm of capability, but rarely attempted by my coworkers). Best efforts aside, I know that I shouldn't have to do all this. It's not only exhausting, it's demeaning!

I have two X chromosomes, and I like it that way!

Rearranging our hours, constantly rechecking our schedule, getting in trouble for the most mundane of things . . . it's painful. And I have to wonder, are all tech jobs this way? Or just this one?