A Blog of the worksite / Life’s little amusements.

It started as a regular day at the workplace, another humdrum day as a security officer controlling/monitoring the back entrance to the worksite, which happened to be a nursing/rehabilitation center. My duties were simple and clear cut, control access to the place as it happens to be near the Farmers Market area of the NW on the way to the downtown area, first exit after the toll on 17th ave. (but usually I take the one before as I already paid enough tolls on the way) and keep residents from leaving without a pass in order to keep an accurate head count of who’s in residence and stay within the Fire Dept. Regulations. You wouldn’t believe how many of the nursing home residents will make a break for it first chance they get…forgetting to get a pass first. Also they’re supposed to leave by the front entrance thereby we have some control of who leaves and whatnot. Some want to leave for a few minutes and come back after getting a pack of cigarettes or whatever. That would be ok with me but rules have to be followed and there’s always the ones that think that rules are meant to be broken, specially with the excuse of being in a nursing home. Parking has always been a problem at that place as most of the workers, myself included, is from another country and brought most if not all of their bad driving habits with them when they came here to live and work. Haiti, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and several countries from Central America are represented in the workplace there not to mention Cuba, of which I am from. That would probably explain the relaxed way in which we treat each other and as far as a workplace goes, I’d rate it as in the top five of interesting and friendly workplaces of all the posts that I’ve worked in. Which is not to say that there are the ones that are not to be trusted there as we are all humans and each group or nationality has good and bad people mixed in with the majority but that place is a smorgasbord of Humanity to say the least. The pay is not much to speak of….the professionals get the best pay of course (nurses, doctors, administrators, etc.)…. but the rest of us get just a tad above minimum wage unless they’ve been there since dirt was invented and yep, some people have been there since primeval times. Me, I’ve been there a mere handful of months and just enough that people there are finally accepting me as one of the group. Since the building is being repainted, the gates have been fixed so they stay open and, although no one knows who initiated it, the chain had been taken off both front and back gates the day they started and that itself leads one to wonder if management (not to mention the painters) had something to do with the decision.

(to be continued)