10:34pm February 16, 2015

I never realized how big the USA is until I moved to Vermont. Also, serious staff appreciation here.

And it wasn’t anything about the travel itself, it was about the immigrants who live here.

In California, immigrants tend to be from Mexico, Central America, Canada, East Asia, and the Pacific Islands.

In Vermont, immigrants tend to be from Canada, lots of parts of Europe and Africa, and mostly West Asia, South Asia and sometimes Southeast Asia.

There’s Latin@ immigrants in both places, but from different parts of Latin America entirely.

The foreign food stores are for different countries than in California, and same with the foreign food aisles in more standard grocery stores. I had never even seen an Eastern European food store until my Slovak friend introduced me (and got me hooked on real paprika and chicken paprikash).

Somehow that shows me the distance I’ve traveled more than any other thing does.

Also the fact that when signs are bilingual here, they’re French and English, and in California they’re either Spanish and English, or Spanish, English, and several Asian languages. Or in some places just Spanish.

This all came from a conversation I was having tonight with a sub floater from the Himalayas. He siad most immigrants he meets on the job, like him, speak at least four or five languages fluently, most of them ones most Americans have never heard of. He is always worried his English isn’t good, but because he’s over-careful his English is more “standard” or (in prescriptivist terms) “correct” than most English speakers I know.

He says it’s because he’s so afraid of screwing up that he overcompensates. Which sucks, but I always suspected that was what was behind the “Sorry for my bad English” – “But you speak English better than most of my friends!” conversation I’ve heard over and over again. It makes me uneasy because it is meant to reassure but instead it doesn’t validate how scary it is to feel like you have to get it right all the time or face even more hostility than you already do for being brown and having a foreign accent. Not to mention invalidating how hard he’s working to speak that well.

It’s like when people compliment me on how articulate I am. And on the one hand, i’m very articulate on specific topics at specific times. But it also means I’m likely to be penalized more harshly when I do screw up, when I can’t type, when I can’t be “on” all the time.

And I see how hard this staff person is constantly working. It’s not just the language he’s struggling with, he’s struggling to appear likeable, he’s strugglig to fit i with a foreign culture,

He’s amazing on the job – in December he started shadowing my staff to get trained in things like med administration and all my daily routine. He did a couple weeks of shadowing, and then he suddenly was the one others were shadowing, and he taught them how to do things better than how he was taught.

There’s also a woman who is, unlike him, my only current regular staff person (besides the super-new lady from this weekend).

One who’d been with me maybe five years, quit because she got married and wanted to start a family.

Another who had been here almost as long, saw that I was unable to say goodbye to my father in person. He himself is maybe a decade younger than my parents. His father is in his eighties or nineties and not in the best health. He decided to go spend time with his dad while he still could. I was 100% behind that decision, even though I had gotten more attached to him than I normally allow myself to get – he felt like the grandfather I never had, even though he’s younger htan both my parents by quite a bit. But he’s like the stereotypical perfect grandfather. One of my grandfahers died without meeting me, and the other was a real piece of work, to put it chairably.

Another quit so she could go to med school full time. She’s an example of a good Slytherin. I told her her ambition and arrogance were going to be serious assets as shewen through med school, and that then she’d have to lose the arrogance and get some humility in order to treat patients well. I think she gets flak because arrogance, ambition , and a “cold” demeanor, which are frowned upon in women. But I actually liked her and we got along great, she was blunt and straightforward and never hesitated to say what she thought. We got along great.

Then there was another staf person who got promoted to sub floater. Sub floater make more money than regular staff. They go to your house when your staff is out sick or on vacation. Or, as in my case right now, when i only have one experienced staff and one highly inexperienced staff. So the floaters have been taking all the extra shifts and that’s good beecaus anyone who works with me since I got the feeding tube has to be well-trained and certified by a nurse.

And then last but not least, one of my favorite staff ever got promoted to case manager. From the day she stepped on the job she knew all the stuff practically without needing training. She also struck both me and other people as neurodivergent. (And she did have a brain-related disease as a kid so at minimum she was a cousin.) She reminds me strongliy of Anne, both in looks and personality.

So this is the first time i’ve lost so many staff so fast, and the sub floaters are all being trained one by one. The guy who was here tonight was one of the most talented and works the hardest, and unfortunately it makes me wonder if it’s racism dictating that he has to be better than the rest to seem even half as good to white employers.

On another related note, I think that staff who are recognized for being good at what they do should be offered three chocies:

Promotion to case manager
Promotion to sub floater or oher position that pays more than staff
Stay as staff but receive a raise and an increase in benefits

I hate the way people think that case manager means better than staff. It means higher up. It requires an entirely different set of skills – many case managers make lousy staff, many staff make lousy case managers. Doing really good at a job shouldn’t have to mean being “rewarded’ by being put into a job you’re not as good at. Not that the transition can’t work – I think it will work for this person, the same as it did for two other of my former staff who are now among the best case managers the company has. But she’s so good at being staff I think they should have offered her the same benefits and pay as a case manager only as staff, in addition to the other options, and let her choose based on what she wants to be doing.

But it doesn’t work that way, and front-line staff, who do the hardest work of all, get the least pay and the least prestige. Which sucks for both staff and clients and leads to a high turnover rate and staff shortages like we’ve got right now.

And unlike most clients, I have so many medical needs that they have to train subs in how to deal with me. Prior to the feeding tube, they’d just send subs in wit barely any instructions, or instructions so long and convoluted they kept calling their supervisors for conformation (asking me wasn’t good enough, back then – the nurse has set them straight that I know what I’m doing, and that any medical risks I take are well-calculated between me and my doctor, and not to be tampered with by agencies and staff.

But right now? Great staff, great sub floaters, great nurse who puts her license on the line to make all his work, just almost entirely great people I’m working with, even after losing a lot of them to promotions or family problems.

And the current staff who’s been here the longest? I wasn’t sure about at first. She made a lot of errors because she was terrified and anxious all the time about getting things wrong. Fast-forward a year and she is training other staff and sub floaters better than anyone, totally confident, totally blossomed into this wonderful interesting person I couldn’t see much of before because she was so scared.