The week that was...

Okay, I know it's only Thursday but, so far, this week has been one of the stranger weeks I've experienced in 17 years on the job.

It started badly, with a co-worker/friend reporting that she was assaulted over the weekend. I've been doing some counseling/supporting/listening whenever she needs to just talk about what happened. I know from personal experience that it will take her a long time to start feeling like herself again.

It continued to go South when re got the report that one of our long time consumers was arrested for a very serious crime. This man is 67 years old and it's likely he'll be going to prison for the rest of his life. What's extraordinary about this is that in all the time we've worked with him we never, ever saw any behavior or had the slightest inkling he would even try doing something like what he has been charged with. Still, the evidence is there now and so he will spend his last days incarcerated.

Then, a aeries of just plain bizarre things happened. People were saying odd things, out of the blue, which kept throwing everyone off. Weird stuff like "You look surprisingly good today." Now that in itself isn't so weird except it makes you wonder how the person was looking the rest of the time! Or this one, when a co-worker called a consumer, asked for him by name, and, with the person she called answering the phone, being asked "Do you want to speak to the white one or the black one?" There is only one. And he's black. So we don't know why he even asked that!

Yesterday, someone who is usually very sweet and nice just snapped at a co-worker. Apparently she thought the co-worker said something about her. The co-worker wasn't even speaking to her at the time but was, rather, petting someones dog and talking to the dog. The sweet, nice person would take no explanation or apology but just told the co-worker to "GO HOME!"

Today, someone came in for his health assessment. One of the nurses met with him to do this only to find out after the fact that another nurse had done it a week ago. The strange thing about this was that the nurse who did the original assessment actually helped the other nurse get all the paperwork together BEFORE the consumer came in. She knew she had already done it and never said a word about it. Just plain weird.

I'm sure today and tomorrow will bring more strangeness to the table. After that I just don't care. I'm off work all next week and thinking about this place, this job and these people is not in my schedule!