Work sucks...

Work has really got me down today.

I don't know what the reason is, but I guess maybe we've started to get enough drama over here in the day and evening shifts that it's starting to get to exploding points? Night shift largely stays out of it, and I like it that way. (But they still find things to hold against us.)

This past month has seen some kind of gruesome record of mislabels and stupid mistakes between both the floors and our laboratory. At first the policy changed such that any time we removed any blood, serum, or plasma from the original draw tube, we had to initial the label. Not such a big deal. Then it went to reminders about how to put labels on original tubes. Now it's down to us questioning every single abnormality that comes across on any patient's results. And handwriting EVERYTHING. (There's a case in which someone in the lab mislabeled a cancer patient's tube with the sticker for a normal patient, and that normal patient was very close to having a bone marrow biopsy performed.)

So I can imagine the stress levels are going up among the day and evening shifters who actually have to face the wrath of management during the hours of 8-5, but I have no idea how widespread these errors are within the lab to warrant such drastic and immediate changes. We also have this communication log, which occasionally becomes a passive-aggressive note minefield - and I seem to have triggered one particular day shifter's mine. We have issues on the night shift that are very likely being worked on, but I don't see the results or anything more than a check-mark beside the things I write down. But this tech, who is definitely more experienced than I am and in charge of the machine set in question, has apparently taken my notes (bare bones comments of "x is out of range") as some kind of attack against her performing her job correctly. The lead tech recently complimented my documenting things that need fixed on the log, but apparently (according to evening shift) that's not how I'm supposed to be doing it.

ARGH.

I also got some comments from the coworker/friend that was filling me in that I've become a topic of gossip. Apparently I can't voice issues that are being "handled" by older techs, and now I'm not supposed to question anything that's done by older-in-age-but-newer-to-Seton techs. What the hell?

So I guess the solution is to come in and just keep my head down for a couple months. And with all the crap going on, I certainly don't deserve this multi-shift scapegoatism that's going on behind my back. I don't have a problem with being wrong about something, but I do have a problem with people not telling me to my face. That's just low.