I recently made the catastrophic mistake of being honest. Last year, I made the equally poor life decision to enhance my career by enrolling in a diploma for my field work. A requirement for the course was to attend eight study days each semester, broken up into two four-day slots totalling 16 on-campus days for the year. Are you following? If not, never mind, read on and I’ll get funny shortly.
As a registered nurse (RN), I work on a rotating roster of days and nights, weekdays and weekend, Christmas and New Year and so on. We’re lucky enough to have a system to take days off for important events such as beers with the boys and when Mum comes to visit.
We only get a number of guaranteed days off each month, and if we request in excess of those days, the roster manager has to prioritise which ones are important. We almost always get our requests granted, especially if education is involved. If you don’t put a request in, it is highly unlikely you’ll get your desired roster.
As I was visiting my daughter earlier this year – she lives in Ireland – submitting a roster request went by the wayside and, with it, my desired days off.
It was only when I returned from my excursion that I realised the extent of my blunder. I was rostered on not one but two of the remaining four study days. I wasn’t too fazed by this as our rosters come out approximately one million years in advance. An RN’s planner needs to be impeccable at the worst of times. So I arranged a swap with Jono (another nurse of similar stature) and that was sweet. But I couldn’t shake the other shift, no matter how hard I tried.
Now, with the prelude over, we’ll meander into the business end of this piece: the truth telling and the beginning of my troubles.
The time fast approached where my employment and education were set to collide. I figured drastic measures had to be taken. The plan crystallised. I would email both parties with the situation and be honest with both. What could go right?
The first victim of my blatant honesty was my roster manager. I dropped her an email and gave her a stark account of my predicament. She replied with her own stark account of staffing for that given day and how I should try to explore what options I had with uni.
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Not many, it would seem.
So with that I packed up my truth-telling, inserted it into an email and sent it to my lecturer, unto which she replied: take annual leave. Not bothering to ask dumb questions, I replied, informing her that my hands were tied. My lecturer remained very polite: “I’ll have a chat with the coordinator and see if we can arrange something”. Happy days. Like a part-time mermaid impersonator with a can of WD40, I thought: “I might just pull this off”.
Whack.
That was the coordinator throwing the book at me. What a nightmare. And to think how simple it would have been, one way or another, if I had just called in sick.
I went to work in the end. Turned up and did the thing. Gave some drugs. Turned my patient. Spoke to the family. Looked my bosses in the eye when they spoke to me and nodded politely before going about my business. And because I was at work it meant I wasn’t at uni. Go figure.
As a result, I had to listen to the lectures I missed online, and explained how they would apply to my professional development. So, my extracurricular work had just produced extracurricular activities. No prizes for how this could have been avoided. Lying.
Unfortunately, this has never come easy to me. It’s my mother’s fault.
From since I could remember, my mother always said to us girls that if we lied, she would find out sooner or later. And when she did, she’d come for us. And when that happened, you didn’t want to be around. Like the time I broke a window at school and she asked “how’d you do that?” So I told her I kicked the ball at it. Then she did the thing where someone asks a question as a statement, you know, “by accident?”. No, on purpose. I tried to break the window. All the boys do it.
That put me well in the firing line.
My oldest sister, on the other hand, has a PhD in lying to Mum – about everything! From where she was the night before, all the way to smoking.
So when it came to lying, or even telling someone something I knew they wouldn’t like to hear, I took after my old boy and said nothing. You know the saying: “say no evil, say no evil”. As a result of this piece I imagine my mother to be very proud of me for not lying and showing up to work. It may even excuse the three months of not calling her.
But as for the rest of you, when presented with a similar situation, lie to your heart’s content. On reflection, it would have been the right thing to do.
• Seamus Jabour is an intensive care nurse
