I despise social media. Indeed, for over ten years, I managed to eschew it completely. I have reluctantly succumbed to Farcebook as a form of marketing my work. I have to accept the reality that it is an effective tool and this is how many people seek products and services these days. I’m still holding out on Twitter, though.
Anyway, one of the things that I dislike so much about it is the manufactured outrage. Well, that and the virtue signalling. Well, that and the shroud waving. Well, that and the emotional incontinence. Well, that and the public shaming.
This little story first came to light a few days ago and followed the usual format – person is upset by something someone does or says, so they shame said person by spreading their fizzog all over social media. Cue the the outrage mob who wade in with opprobrium and anything from mild disapproval to outright threats of violence and death. And all this having only heard one side of the story.
But, as is usual, there’s more to this than meets the eye. As with any story there are three sides – yours, hers and the truth.
Friends of an ICU nurse have jumped to her defence after she was identified as a woman who left a carer in tears in a B&M store.
Devastated key worker Kimberley Simpson shared a video of a woman she said had aggressively accused her of “spreading germs” which has since gone viral.
Kimberley, from Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire, said the shopper had left her in tears all afternoon after the exchange.
Since the video was widely shared, the other woman in the video has been named as ICU nurse Marina Kendrick.
Ah… right, so all was not as it seemed. Now, I wasn’t there, so maybe Kendrick wasn’t as tactful as she could have been. However, none of this justifies the backlash she received and she wouldn’t have received the backlash if the other party hadn’t decided to shame her on Facebook. That turned out well, didn’t it?
“She has years of professional nursing experience.
“She was 100% within her rights to challenge this individual who could well have been putting fellow shoppers and retail assistants at risk.”
And Eunice continued: “All nurses /care staff should either change out of the uniform or cover it up when leaving work.
“I don’t want to stand next to someone who could’ve been changing soiled bed etc when I’m buying my food shopping.”
Personally, I wouldn’t have thought much about it and certainly wouldn’t have said anything to her, but being a specialist in her field Ms Kendrick felt obliged. Now having made a fuss all over social media, Ms Simpson has made herself look a chump. Yet if they had settled their differences quietly and privately, none of this would have happened.
I can’t make up my mind which is the chicken and which is the egg – social media that is an enabling force for this behaviour or simply that people are largely pretty awful towards each other?
You know, I’m not advocating going out covered in shit, but if we carry on this fucking lunacy of being scared of touching anything, being near anybody and the current OTT hysteria for germ killing, nobody is going to have any resistance to anything.
To me its a non story, both these women are as bad as each other. The carer is wrong to attempt whipping up the Twitter mob, but the ICU nurse is not innocent either. For years my late sister was a nurse in a mental hospital and had to endure being labelled a scum by ‘proper’ nurses. There is an atmosphere of rank pulling among nurses that no one sees, and I will hedge a bet that the ICU nurse started it because she saw an opportunity to show an underling some authority and make a public display of it.
My daughter started as a nurse around 2001, on the neurology ward. Apart from a couple of friends there she had a pretty hard time with those above her. But she stuck at it, and fast forward to a month ago, she was appointed ward sister – on the neurology ward. Those nurses who berated her before are now shitting themselves.
Something that one never sees mentioned in discussions of why the NHS is so dysfunctional is the fact that its largely staffed by women, particularly at the lower staff levels (nurses/nursing assistants/ward manager levels) and that it is well known that if you put a lot of women together in a workplace they end up fighting like rats in a sack.
I would put good money on the fact that a large part of the dysfunction of the NHS is down to the fact that there are a myriad of personal vendettas going on between women in each and every part of it, at every level. A won’t talk to B, who hates C as well.
You only have to compare the Army with the NHS – the Army is a completely State run organisation, like the NHS. But is (or rather was) predominantly male. It manages to function reasonably well in crises. Plans have already been put in place, are implemented and stuff happens on the ground, whether that’s delivering aid to a disaster zone, or dropping bombs on someone. Its a State run organisation that manages to deliver its core objectives. Whereas the NHS doesn’t. It falls over all the time. The whole thing is riddled with lack of communication and failure to follow through with plans.
I have to conclude that the gender makeup of the NHS is one of its fundamental problems (to go alongside its lake of any sort of market accountability whatsoever). But of course such thought is heresy.
Its not all female Jim, far from it. Both LR and I can testify to the bully in the workplace. For them, the more public the berating the better, they actually enjoy exerting their authority for everyone to see. Feeling ‘obliged’ is just an excuse to do that. The difference between me and LR is that he is a more decent person than I am, he decided to let it go and left the job, whereas I stuck the vendetta out to the bitter end for 2 years, played equally as dirty as my opponent and ended up having that person removed. Sometimes its worth lowering one’s own standards to prevent the same happening to anyone else. But you do it alone. The carer woman’s mistake was to attempt the sympathy vote from the mob, and that backfired.
While I agree with your comments about the Army Jim but how much market accountability does it have? ( Army as distinct from MOD).
Thats my point , the Army has zero market accountability, and is utterly State owned and run. It ‘should’ be as disfunctional as the NHS is. But it isn’t. As weren’t the railways and other nationalised industries back in the day. They functioned. Maybe at huge financial cost, but the trains did still get to their destinations, steel was produced, etc etc. The only difference with the NHS is that it is a predominantly female organisation (70%+ I think) and all the other mentioned organisations were male dominated.
I think that there is a significant difference between the male and female psyches – men will work together towards a common goal, even if they dislike some of the other members of the team, because they view the overall objective as greater than their own personal whims. I think this has roots in our caveman ancestors – men hunted in packs, and the only way to be successful was to put aside personal dislike and work collectively together. Because if they didn’t everyone went hungry. Better to kill the mammoth together with people you dislike and have a full belly than refuse to co-operate and go hungry. Women on the other hand were hunter gatherers, where co-operation results in loss of resources – if you find a good source of berries, why tell the other women where it is, they’ll only strip it bare, and you lose out. Thus men learned co-operation was preferable to personal animosity, and women the exact opposite.
One has to remember that women in the workplace is a relatively new phenomenon – in mass terms less than 50 years. We are only now seeing organisations that are predominantly female staffed and run, due to it taking generations for older male employees to retire and be selectively replaced by female ones.
All our presumptions about how well organisations have functioned in the past are not necessarily going to hold true, because those old organisations were generally male dominated, and their efficiency levels will not necessarily carry over to an exactly similar organisation that is female dominated.
Men and women are NOT the same, and pretending that organisations will function the same regardless of their gender makeup will result in organisations that are failing and no-one can understand why.
There is also the point that the men who do eventually remain in increasingly female-dominated industries will be those who utterly toe the feminist (and all that comes with it) line.
Any man who wasn’t prepared to do so would now be foolish to even think about entering such an organisation. Even then, one hint of an accusation of even one careless, misunderstood or frustrated word, and his career would be ruined.
Not quite market accountability but, getting it wrong in the army can be (personally) fatal, in the NHS that is someone else’s fatality.
Well, you don’t get many complaints from someone targeted by a 105mm high explosive shell.
So there is that, I suppose, plus the lack of a complaints desk on the front line war zones.
Ms Kendrick had spent some years teaching nursing at University (returning to ICU to assist in the ‘crisis’). It may be that her professionalism got the better of her haranguing a younger co-worker in public.
btw ms Simpson, wearing your uniform off the premises carries germs down a two way street.
Trouble with people like Simpson (men and women) is they get agitated when criticised and the more they know themselves to be in the wrong the more agitated they get. In this modern age her agitation took the form of sympathy mongering on Twitter, in the past her gang of mates would probably have pulled Ms Kendrik down the street by her hair or dunked her in the village pond as a Scold.
Simpson should have been spanked on the bum for being naughty age 5 but perhaps it was her mother who said on the telly
“You won’t let me smack me fakin’ kids so You fakin’ make em be’ave”. (I have some sympathy with that viewpoint),