Hermes Labs - day 1

After having six weeks off prior to starting Hermes Labs, I was a little worried about whether or not I had made the right choice. I know I will never again work at KRONOS, that bridge has been burned. Actually, that doesn’t really describe it. Bridges can be re-built. It’s more like the 9/11 twin towers thing. I shook them to the core and they as a nation/business may never truly recover from it. Within weeks of me leaving the training department had pumped out a couple of bullshit training modules on discrimination, bullying and conflict resolution. Covering their arses and with the same lack of self-awareness as an obese person in hotpants, the biggest bullies of all wrote the book on anti-bullying. Since I have been gone, they have also re-written their social media policy, and doubled down on trying to turn my friends against me. Oh, how the mighty respond to a slight panic, not with a dismissive wave of their powerful hand, but an outraged fatwa against the person who dared to call them out on their bullshit.

A few days before I was due to start, I decided to double check they Hermes Labs ditched me or retracted their agreement to hire me. Of course, they hadn’t, I’m fabulous, and any employer would be lucky to have me. I had planned a birthday getaway that unfortunately coincided with the Hospital opening. The area manager allowed me to take leave without pay less than a fortnight into my new job. So far, everything was looking incredibly considerate and professional. When I started at KRONOS, I told them in the interview I had already booked and paid for a trip a month later. It was a trip to Byron Bay with my gay mates, to a gay festival where I planned to do very gay things and to top up my mojo. I didn’t word it this way in the interview, but I did let them know I had a pre-existing commitment for that time. KRONOS insisted it wouldn’t be a problem, but when the trip drew close, I was informed that my leave application had been rejected.

Not willing to miss my long planned and deeply needed week of gay hedonism, I chucked a sickie and went anyway. Hermes Labs emailed me saying I would be training out West at a Hospital for 2 weeks. It was 8am-4pm. It was a bit of a trek, not up there with climbing Everest but a trek all the same for your middle-class white boy not accustomed to travelling great distances without a guaranteed fuck at the other end. For good sex I will travel, in fact I rank all of my sexual partners on how much effort I would put into travelling to have sex with them. Some people are ‘I would hop on a 10hr international flight for ½ an hour with them’, others are ‘I would walk for 15mins, so long as it’s not raining, and there’s nothing good on Netflix’. It’s a good ranking system and it has always worked for me. Any hoo, I drove west young man, I drove west. I arrived early and scored a free parking spot at the front of the Hospital, I claimed it as my own for the duration. In hindsight it may have been an ambulance bay, a free spot outside a Hospital is after all an anomaly, but for 2 weeks it was my spot.

Leonie and I easily located the rooms and noticed a sign on the door saying that the collection rooms weren't open until 8.30am. Leonie and I decided to wait but no-one else arrived. We called our new boss Sharon, there had been a mix-up. Training was Monday to Thursday 8:30-2:30. Both Leonie and I were a bit disappointed. We were both full time employees, relying on the wage, but alas training was a part-time thing.

Sharon leaving KRONOS had been the best decision of her life. After years of dedicated hard work at KRONOS, she requested a later start time and was refused. Sharon had separated from her husband, and as a newly single mum was struggling to get her 3 children to school and get to work on time. In this glorious time of family friendly workplaces, her request was refused and she was banished to KRONOS Siberia for her uppity insolence.

Standing in the training Hospital after 4 weeks without an income, the prospect of two weeks of part-time income was a bit daunting. I did financial calculations in my head and was pleased to discover if I ate vegemite sandwiches and drank ALDI coffee for a fortnight, I should just scrape through. The lazy bitch inside of me was pleased that I wouldn’t be leaping straight from 4 weeks holiday to full time work in a single bound, the me that had bills to pay was less pleased with the situation. Two other newbies arrived at 8:30 and we all waited, and waited. At 9am a man called Pretti casually wandered in with the mellow of someone who spent the first ½ hour of their work day smoking a joint. He was our trainer. He took us to a training room and just stared at us for a while. He had no idea what he was supposed to be doing so he spent an hour just awkwardly staring off into the distance, probably re-living happy memories of some past hippie adventure. Not knowing what else to do Pretti had us watch him do a bleed, then we each did a bleed while he watched. All of us were experienced collectors, so this training was about Hermes Labs procedures, not ‘how to stick a needle in a vein and make it bleed’ training.

Pretti did the bleed and I paid attention to the differences in how I had done things at KRONOS. The main differences are that Pretti doesn’t use a kidney dish, and he washes his hands only twice not the five times they insist on at KRONOS. Other than that, taking blood is taking blood and aside from minor individual quirks it’s all the same. I volunteered to go first because the energy in the room was lower than a sausage dogs’ rectum and I couldn’t face 3 more days at this pace. The first patient through the door was a pathology classic. The person who announces they have difficult veins, it needs to be a hand bleed with a butterfly, and tells you a story about the time it took 1345 attempts to get the blood. They always have great veins, and they are always unable to hide their disappointment when you get the blood on the first attempt. Some of them are so determined to continue the charade that they will attempt to sabotage a successful bleed. It is always the people with ‘bad veins’ that have a random coughing fit, or sudden excruciating leg cramp that causes them to move enough to dislodge the needle once the blood is flowing. Honestly a successful bleed causes their faces to crumple like a cat’s arse. Taking blood is all about confidence, if you believe you can do it, I would say 95 percent of the time you can. That other 5 percent is the genuinely difficult stuff that takes skill and can’t be done on bluff alone. For some messed up reason, there is a section of society that is convinced without reason that they are the 5%. How fucked is a person whose sense of specialness is based on something like that? I don’t ever want to be medically special; I want every Dr I meet to say ‘Seen it a million times, here take this one tablet and it’s all fixed’. I want every medical person to say ‘aside from your glorious penis, you are the most normal person I have ever met’. I want every phlebotomist to say ‘that vein basically bleeds itself, thank-you for pretty much doing my job for me’. But some people, and it’s always the healthyish ones who have never been genuinely sick and unable to find answers, are determined to be the glorious anomaly we all fucking hate. His veins were fine, a little rollie, a little scarred, but nothing unmanageable. I did my stuff, at less than full confidence, because a long break will do that to you. The blood didn’t flow right away and I internally cursed the fucker for perhaps genuinely being a person with difficult veins. Then the blood began to flow, I still had it, I am good at what I do.

One week in and it is interesting to see how many people have been burned by KRONOS. KRONOS is discriminatory, and is run by evil power-hungry people. They have lost their way, and fallen into that third stage of life, where they did not retire or move onto something they could enjoy in their later years of life. The job became them, and the job was power and money.

Hermes Labs is largely populated by people who have been betrayed by KRONOS. There was Judy. Judy had worked for KRONOS for 19 years. She walked with a noticeable limp, one that looked painful, but she did her best to hide it. While working for KRONOS Judy was attacked by a patient. KRONOS tried to sweep it under the carpet and gave her no support. They fought the workers compensation claim, and Judy had to get legal counsel. Eventually they paid her out, but the damage was done. Despite giving 19 years of her life to KRONOS, they had failed her. When she was hurt, they did not support her. Since Judy had never planned on leaving KRONOS, she had never followed up on the certification paperwork they were meant to have given her. All successful trainees are given a certificate 3 in Pathology after their second year. Judy needed her certificate to get a job with Hermes Labs and KRONOS was not going to hand it over without a fight. Judy had more than earned her certificate with 19 years of loyal and dedicated service. Bella, head trainer at KRONOS called Judy and gave her a guilt trip. ‘I thought you would have at least had the courtesy to tell me you were leaving’ Judy was gobsmacked. She had left KRONOS a month previously and, in that time, no-one had called to see how she was going. She had been betrayed and abandoned like an old nag sent to the glue factory and forgotten. Yet now here she was being accused of being in-courteous.

They had treated her like absolute crap, and now they were playing the victim. To them Prudence was still just the employee number K5337, nothing more and nothing less and Bella hadn’t even noticed that first month she was gone. Hermes Labs has so many former KRONOS employees that their culture has been somewhat shaped by KRONOS. They go out of their way to create a culture as different from KRONOS as possible. They try to create a happy environment for their staff, and treat them like human beings not just numbers. The more I learn about this new company and the people I am working with, the more I see what a terrible place KRONOS is.

So many people have had terrible experiences with KRONOS, an entire new company is able to rise. An entire company can be built using the people who have been burnt, hurt and betrayed by KRONOS. Take a moment to think about it. It is so wrong on so many levels. Yet that’s how the world turns.