What would you tell another person who's only five months into a demanding job and makes mistakes sometimes?.
It was five weeks, not months. It's now 7 weeks, which includes the almost full week missed because of the snow.
Things were going better? at least I thought so. now we don't know what to think. today was a trainwreck.... so....
not too long after we'd been open, blunt coworker and I were in the front. I found blunt coworker a bit hard to deal with at first but generally don't now. she's blunt but also kind and funny. we do have troubles reading her sometimes. anyway, office manager comes storming out. she starts talking, sort of to both of us, but looking at me about a cat, and how it's a bite/scratch cat and that wasn't noted correctly.. she then specifically singles me out, saying other stuff is in my handwriting. she's pissed and there's no having a conversation so I'm just saying "ok". I don't even know which cat she's talking about. I say sorry about the time she's flipping pages, and based on the quick glimpse I get, I begin to suspect I'm not the culprit. she stomps to the back still clearly pissed.
so.. my stomach is all in knots but I'm trying to regroup. things go ok up front with blunt coworker for a while. I keep wanting to get a few quiet moments to go look at the chart so I can understand what happened but we are crazy busy. I am trying to ask more questions, because the feedback I've been given by office manager is I need to ask more questions. she's talked about me not asking questions about things I didn't even know enough to ask the question about (if that makes sense). blunt coworker is being a bit snarky about my questions. And some of that might have been because I was feeling raw and some of it was probably true. And I get that she thinks I should know some of this stuff and some of it I really do know but I'm rattled and don't want to get scolded for doing something else wrong.
then I did make a stupid mistake. I had a customer come in to get meds for her dog. we had two customers with meds pending, with very similar last names and I grabbed the wrong pet. I didn't realize it yet. (more to come)
went to lunch. older coworker was eating lunch. I really like her and she's worked there longer than anyone but the doctor. she is older, and also talks in a quiet, calm voice. seems very nurturing. I grab the cat file and look at it. the "bite/scratch" was a recent add. It was added *after* I labeled the sheet. so the fact it wasn't added onto the page they were looking at wasn't my fault, because it was done after I'd done the heading for the file pages. I feel better about the fact I didn't completely miss something. So I show older cowrker because I'm getting a bit tired of being blamed for freaking everything (whine whine, gross exaggeration) and especially in the way office manager did. and for something I didn't do. I wanted to confirm that older coworker saw I wasn't the one who screwed up. partly just to confirm to myself I wasn't nuts. I asked her if it would do any good if I pointed that out to office manager that I may not be the person to blame, or not blame fully and she said probably not, but that she would say something. we appreciated that.
then blunt coworker ccomes back and askes about the meds and we figure out what I did. And i feel sick because giving somebody the wrong meds is a big mistake and we are freaking out. blunt coworker is going on and on to office manager about what I did and they tell me to go back to lunch. so I go sit down with older coworker and I'm all upset and I guess she asks? so I explain what happens and she said she could see how that mistake could happen which makes me feel
slightly less horrible. still was a stupid, unacceptable mistake.
then I am done with lunch and back to work and I feel awful and can't get myself together and blunt coworker is sort of riding my case and double checking everything and pointing out every tiny mistake I'm making (small learner mistakes) and she says she's doing it because of the big mistake I made and that she will pound this stuff into my brain (at least she thinks we teachable). And we get why she's doing it but it's just making me screw up more.
And I know me eating myself up inside over this stuff and letting it make me make more mistakes is counterproductive but I can't seem to stop it.
And I am also pretty positive that office manager has made up her mind about me and it's not positive. there's all these small things she does that suggest that and we not someone who prone to saying people don't like us. (but maybe we just being a whiner). we didn't post about it here but the other day she was having a super bad day and we were getting confused and made a small mistake (truthfully) and she started yelling... well, scolding us in front of customers. And we *know* that was out of line, if we think with anything besides our emotional wounded parts. and .... part of me wants to say the way she is treating me is utter bullshit and I don't deserve it and part of me is thinking how I keep proving her right and if I hadn't screwed up early on and didn't keep screwing up she wouldn't have that attitude.
and part of our issue with the job is that it's all on paper (almost all) and because of that our learning disabilities matter again. And that makes us feel small and stupid and hopeless. And part of it...*maybe*, is they keep forgetting they supposed to be teaching us. I mean, if you look at it like we only been there 7 weeks then we still learning. But that doesn't excuse giving the wrong meds so maybe we making an excuse and are just a f*ckup.
