Institutional Memory

Originally published fourteen years ago.  I have put the editing in parentheses.

 

Grumbling about work...

The central narrative of my 30+ (eventual 42) year employment at the hospital was being asked to work with the staff that no one else would, often put in those exact terms, culminating in being supervised by an insane person 1991-99. Then after, the liberation from this in 1999-2006, when I worked with the most wonderful people and everything I touched turned to gold. As central as those are, they are now virtually unknown outside a circle of about a half dozen people at work, and perhaps a dozen of my friends and family.

This was brought home forcefully over the last month (April 2011) in three work conversations. The previous supervisor, and what a strange, almost dangerous person she was, came up in conversation in matters unrelated to me. I mentioned that she had been my supervisor for eight years and received amazed, shocked looks. But she's diagnosable.* Dr. K made a detailed, non-humorous case for it when she covered on our unit, and gave us instructions how we were to deal with it. The other stunned comment was similar.

I thought: Yes, yes I know this. I said this for years, trying to get people to listen. But it's over now, and it ended well, actually. You didn't know? You worked the next unit over and no one ever mentioned it? Huh.

Similarly, the buoyant days of doing two jobs at once for the sheer joy of being appreciated and feeling competent had also slipped the minds of some I was sure would remember. Vague nods. Well shucks, then. I was kind of thinking I was holding the department aloft, covering for the impossible person, followed by covering two jobs. Those powerful people who assured me this was all being observed at a high level, and something would be done about it...well, I long ago figured out that no one was going to take any risks and do anything about it. But I guess I had still harbored the fantasy that someone had noticed those fifteen years.

So I asked the (new, third department head later) head of my department whether any of this information had ever come to her in passing over her three years here. Nope. She was quite fascinated, actually. She spoke with at least one other long-time member of the department about it after. I don't know that it changes anything. Just another up-short reminder: it is not merely that people see things differently and remember things differently - it is that most things aren't remembered at all. On the plus side, that may mean two major screwups of mine from those years, topics that I still wince at whenever someone wanders near them, may also have vanished.

Human nature being what it is, that's less likely, actually. But we are less noticed than we think. (Commenter Mike, who also worked for the State of NH, noted that this seemed fairly typical of what working for his agency was like as well.)

(And now even I had almost forgotten. When I read the old post I couldn't think when this had last occurred to me.  Right after full retirement, I'll bet. It all seems as if it happened to another person now.)

Ah, if only Stalin knew, (they used to tell themselves. I learned to understand that delusion quite well myself, but did escape it before the end.)

*I would now say Autism. Others claimed it was Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder with Psychotic Features, and I won't bore you with the differential.