Diagnostic Essay - First Draft
If you were to ask me, “Which job has been the worst job you’ve had?” I would have to immediately scream, “Working at a nursing home!” It wasn’t that I hated old people or anything like that, but more so, it was due to a very huge misunderstanding of what my job involved me doing. Although I ended up working at that nursing home for less than two weeks, in my mind it was still the worst job I have ever had.
It all started when my mom had told me to apply as a housekeeper at this one nursing home near our place called “Our Lady of Perpetual Help”. I thought it was a brilliant idea knowing that I did needed some extra cash, but most of all, because my mom had said that she had some friends work there before and from what she heard, it was just a bunch of dusting, a little bit of cleaning (which supposedly wasn’t much at all, due to the fact that most of the senior citizens living in that nursing home barely did a lot of moving, according to my mom), and some organizing/rearranging of their bedrooms. Still thinking it was a great idea, I headed over to the nursing home the very next day, and I was hired on the spot as a housekeeper! For a second I felt it was a little bit too good to be true, but when the head of housekeeping had pretty much assured me the same exact job tasks my mother had mentioned the previous day, I felt relieved thinking it’d be a piece of cake, and I went on thinking nothing of it. That day I got hired, I was told that my training day was also that very same week so I decided to buy my uniform that night, until the only thing I had left to do was come into work for my training.
On the day of my training, I was pretty excited to learn the ropes with my trainer, Ms.Alnova. She was very pleasant, and she just kept telling me how easy of a job it was as she showed me around the nursing home. She showed me all sections of the nursing home I had to cover, and they were mainly the bedrooms of the senior citizens who lived there and each room consisted of one bathroom and window. During the training she told me that my only tasks were to dust, open the blinds once the resident of that room has awaken, rearrange certain items when misplaced (like if the soap bar was on the carpet instead of the sink), refill the hand soap if necessary, and to change the trash if it were ever full. Then she asked me if I had the hang of it already, and not thinking twice, I answered, “Yes”, since I thought there really wasn’t much too it. It wasn’t until she had taken me out of her wing and had left the building that I realized how much my “yes” should have been a “no, no, no”.
Right after Ms.Alnova had gone off for the day, I picked up from where we left off. Ms.Alnova and I had done 3 rooms together, meaning I only had 22 more rooms to go since there were only 25 bedrooms in each section. After doing 4 bedrooms on my own, a nurse who worked with the caretakers in that section of the nursing home approached me. First she greeted me with a warm welcome then she came back with a toilet cleaner, thinking I had forgot to carry it around with me that day. I was in shock because in my head I was thinking of how sure I was that Ms.Alnova never mentioned to me that type of dirty work involving feces. So politely, I asked the nurse, “Are you sure that’s a part of my job?” and she replied confidently “Yes, that’s also a housekeeper’s job honey” continuing it with “especially when the toilets are clogged (which does happens often here), or if there are any feces lying around, you guys pick those up along with the used diapers you’ll find in the rooms also, but don’t worry, when that happens just ask us nurses for special gloves.” And I knew right then and there that I had finally found the downside of my job.
I couldn’t believe how uninformed I was and after cleaning and unclogging more than 8 overflowing-feces-filled-toilets that day, the image of my sugarcoated dream job just vanished. I was so upset, and it made sense in my head why everyone was saying that there was barely any dusting, rearranging and all that other easy task to do in those rooms, and it was basically because all your time goes to the toilets making sure it’s clean in and out, wiping pee spills, cleaning up the feces that have missed the toilets, unclogging toilets, moping the bathroom floors, and picking up smelly diapers that the nurses just throw on the floor for you to pick up every day. It was the worst job I’ve ever had and I couldn’t wait to go home in the end of every shift just to take the longest shower of my life, making sure I had not one particle of poop on me. I eventually quit that job after less than two weeks, and my reason was far from the truth, but Ms.Alnova was very understanding and I was glad, but deep down my evil side was whispering, “Yeah, you better be understanding.. You just tricked me and left out the horrible things about housekeeping!” But of course, I kept all that inside and walked away with a smile and a lesson learned. Never do housekeeping ever again!
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