'Did You Get A Pen?'

Last Thursday, the cafeteria at St. John's Queens Hospital was jampacked with nurses, doctors, housekeepers, PCAs, kitchen staff, transporters and all manner of hospital workers, desperately seeking employment for a job fair.

"Why?" you ask. "Why would the hospital that just axed hundreds of employees entertain such a ludicrous idea?"

Well, folks, that's how it rolls nowadays. The surrounding hospitals have been given lots of moolah to help. Isn't that wonderful! Hence the job fair. They handed out pens. No jobs, just pens and promises of jobs, in the future. "E-mail us your re- sume!" they told us. "We'd love to hear from you. By the way, did you get a pen?"

The finance departments of these "surrounding" hospitals must be pinching themselves. Maybe they can form a committee and hire some consultants to decide how best to utilize their "windfall"—um, I mean, how best to help out those poor "separated" employees nearby.

Oh yes, I can just hear the bean counters now. "Let's see, should we use the money to hire more employees, whose salaries will be a continuous drain on our institutions once the 'sacks of stimulated money' have been spent? Or should we use the money to pad our coffers and line our pockets?" Tough call.

"But," you say, "what about the politicians? They will make sure the money goes to the people who have lost their jobs, right? Over their dead bodies will the money be spent for anything else, right?"

"But," you say, "what about the union?" They are getting help from the state Department of Health, something to the tune of $3 million, to assist with the jobless throng they have just created. And I am absolutely certain THAT money will be used appropriately. Not on some mind-numbing committee, whose endless paperwork will be continuously lost, resulting in the necessity at union headquarters to hire more employees to find the lost paperwork. No. Absolutely not!

Yep, I am certain that hospital administrators and the union will pull together and put patients first, just as they always have in the past—NOT!

The "job fair" was shabby and pathetic. You could not place monetary value on the experience of the employees gathered in the cafeteria on Thursday. A nurse of 40 years said "How do you cut and paste your resume and e-mail it?" One of the hospital representatives at the table eyerolled her. I thought: "You little turd, she could save your life in a second." But the point is moot, because in this day and age, knowing how to e-mail means more.

So, by the time us "old timers" figure out how to do our resumes, e-mail, cut and paste, interface with human resources, fill out our unemployment forms in triplicate, gather the pertinent information, take on-line examinations to apply for jobs on-line and never actually see a human being, the other hospitals will have spent all their money and the union will be broke from hiring buses for useless rallies.

"Did you get a pen?"