Why so angry ?

Why does it seem, to me, that everyone is so bloody angry at the moment ?

Of course it isn’t everyone I meet ; when for instance I go into town and have coffee the boys and girls (baristas) are perfectly polite and friendly – maybe that’s partially because they hand out what they get – which is unusual politeness from me. My experience of cars and drivers when either walking around the lanes here or being behind the wheel myself is that I have experienced near to or actual road rage several times and mostly it’s been for no good reason – except perhaps that I anger the drivers just by being there – actually walking. Riding the trike has also been a bit of an odd experience in that drivers have been either curious (WTF is that) or just plain mystified ; one explanation from other riders of recumbent trikes is the assumption that I am some variety of disabled and maybe even a bit special (special as in special needs).

I very rarely attempt to tell jokes here so today i’m going to do something special ; no, not trying to tell a bad joke in print but recalling a time I told a very special joke and got absolute daggers (visually) for it.

And so to begin…..

This was in 1984, the actual year and not the novel by the way and it just happened to be the year that I took my final exams at the school of nursing.  As you can imagine that was a pretty stressful time and it got even worse just before our results were due ; in fact about 2am of the day they were due a few us were up in the hospital canteen getting a late night shift meal along with some of the trained and auxiliary staff who were still based there. At that time it was also still possible for the night staff to get a cooked meal unlike now where most night staff seem to be regarded (by most hospital trusts) as being second class workers who didn’t deserve a hot meal at night.

There were maybe half a dozen of our training ‘set’ together at one table and then the mixed staff from another hospital unit at another. If anything we were a bit manic and wondering what it would be like if we failed our finals – I for example already had my first staff nurse job riding on the result and several I knew that several of my fellow students were in the same position ; no pressure then !

So, as to the joke then I was more acting it out rather then telling it : I won’t even try to revisit it here but just to say that it’s main proponent was a young man who not only was a bit ‘special needs’ (we weren’t exactly PC in those days) but had a speech impediment as well – the joke itself was about him being sent down the coalmines and spends days getting to the coalface and ultimately realizing why we were at war – the reason being, as he put it, that we are (and I quote) that we are nicking (stealing) their ******* coal !.  Honestly it was better acted but then I had had a drink or two.

The visual ‘daggers’ by the way all came from the staff on the one table all coming from what we would have also called the ‘special needs’ unit. Like I say our language was anything but PC in those days but was already a lot more liberal than the way staff used to refer to patients back in the days when the local village held that odd collection of the unfortunate people who had anything from ‘special needs’ to severe psychiatric conditions. It’s strange how the language twists and turns yet ends up meaning the same thing…..’mother’ to ‘birthing person’ is one of the more egregious examples.

Obviously the trained staff that night were pretty angry about a whole load of rude, loud and obnoxious students letting off a bit of steam.

Today though my partner seems to come home most days angry about the rudeness of either patients or more often senior doctors or more often the nurse-managers. Patient rudeness I kind-of get because many of them might be a bit scared to begin with and the normal distribution of trait psychology would be close to the same as you would get in normal life – which, in this case would be the equivalent of them being the Audi and BMW drivers who I have caused a minor annoyance to and maybe slowed down their journey by even a few seconds.

I should point out, at this stage in the blog, that the usual flavor of salt water around here is extra salty today because, as I write, i’m a solid 54 hours into a dietary fast and therefore very strongly in Ketosis – which can make me a bit tetchier than even my usual state when I am talking about high end German saloon cars and snotty nurse managers. It’s also the first new potential blog post in several months because without writing (typing at least) then I can be profoundly bored when I don’t have bits of boat to build.

So, the ‘people’ vs the people (in the shape of aggressive car drivers and bad management) are just two examples why I am angry nearly every day and even why my partner comes home in a bad mood. For her it’s obvious and that is simply the end result of working under staffed, under resourced and greatly under appreciated in the kind of place you would be if, for instance, you’d just had an actual heart attack. Maybe that’s the kind of place run by the kind of people that it would be a very good idea to keep on your side. Instead though managers now regularly act like arrogant bullies towards staff and the whole running of the hospital is based on top down pressure brought on by an increasing number of highly paid managers who don’t actually seem to do very much except send each other endless Email and attend pointless meetings – for instance about the language change from ‘mother’ to ‘birthing person’,

My original question was ‘why so angry’ and I feel that I should narrow that down by changing it ever so slightly to ‘why are you so angry today’ or ‘what are you really angry about today’ -perhaps make a very long list and then try to narrow it down to a top 10 (top 100 more like)

1.