Lockers
Friday, March 12, 2010
It's exam week here, and those of us at The Coast have trekked to the Big Tertiary Hospital for clinical exams. There's a swish new building for students there, complete with a swanky common room and this wall of space-aged combination lockers. You can use them for five minutes or five months, if you want. Look at them, all patterned green and shiny and new.
Up at The Coast there's a single bay of ratty old lockers, maybe thirty in total. We even have to bring our own padlocks. At the Coast, the Clinical Coordinator puts your name on your locker.
That really speaks volumes about both Hospitals, and it's the reason I chose The Coast.
Up at The Coast there's a single bay of ratty old lockers, maybe thirty in total. We even have to bring our own padlocks. At the Coast, the Clinical Coordinator puts your name on your locker.That really speaks volumes about both Hospitals, and it's the reason I chose The Coast.
Ah! My clinical school bought those lockers last year or the year before!
Nightmare!
Initially there was a flurry of emails from the clinical school telling us to read the bloody emails and stop getting locked out of our lockers. Then there was a slightly sheepish one saying "er yes there was a slight mistake on our part... they should work properly now..."
Then began the series of emails about people forgetting which locker was theirs - ours were all the same colour (white). A new system was implemented: if you needed a staff member to come and liberate your belongings, a $5 fine would apply if the locker that was opened was not yours.
I think this fine was then applied to anyone who needed help getting stuff out of their locker more than once.
The final series of emails was about The Red Button. "DO NOT PRESS THE RED BUTTON!!". I had not noticed that there was a red button up to that point... now I was curious! What did it do?!
I too had been off in the wilds when the lockers were first installed and didn't have to use them until the second half of the year. After using up my one "get out of jail free" card, I gave up and took my bag to the wards and stashed it under a desk in the nurses' station.