Funny how it goes
Tonight was my last shift at the hostel. My last ever keyworking session there was with the fella I mentioned in October 4th's posting, "AAARRRRGGGHHHH!". I was fully intending to receive his tirade of paranoid ravings and then tell him to go away in no uncertain terms. However (as I generally suspected) I still found myself trying to reason with him.
And with the insight brought to me by the knowledge that I would never have to deal with him again, I found that I actually got some sense through. He only threatened to shoot everyone in Social Services twice, and I eventually got him to agree that it might not be a good thing to be viewed as a terrorist by the service providers that are trying to help him. I even got away with goading him about religion for a bit. I was tempted to play on a previous comment he made about all the staff being "children of satan"* for a laugh, but I left it.
Hopefully, now that I'll be working 9-to-5 hours I'll get something of a social life back and will be able to post about things other than hostel/new job (outreach worker) encounters. However, due to the current absence of a life...
There was a big metal acro-prop holding up part of the stairs in the hostel for the whole 18-odd months I worked there. It was taken away yesterday as it was found that the slight lean of the prop was pulling the banister away from the stairs, thus giving the bottom step nothing to rest on at one end. It was quite interesting/alarming to stand on the flight under those stairs and watch our heavier residents challenge the building's structural integrity.
Thinking about it, that would have been an interesting Darwin Award. "Hostel worker crushed by fat bloke and half a semi-derelict building".
What I was getting to with this part of the post was that whenever I leave a place, job, whatever, they immediately spend some money somewhere and improve things there. At uni they put phone lines and internet connections in the halls of residence just as we moved out. At the first hostel I worked at I was pissed off with the gaps in building security due to lack of enough cameras, and just after I left they got a new digital system which does it all. And in the other hostel there is now a distinct lack of metal pole to make nervous jokes about when visitors are shown around the building. The place looks vaguely normal.
Then again, it's possible that the staircase will collapse without the acro-prop and they will have to close the hostel down.
Or maybe nothing will happen at all and that bloke's paranoia has just been filtering into my subconscious. Only time will tell.
*My girlfriend helpfully pointed out that if you know your bible, Satan would only sire one offspring - the Anti-Christ. Of course I made this point during a keyworking debate, but he just wouldn't listen to me. Apparently I'm damned.
And with the insight brought to me by the knowledge that I would never have to deal with him again, I found that I actually got some sense through. He only threatened to shoot everyone in Social Services twice, and I eventually got him to agree that it might not be a good thing to be viewed as a terrorist by the service providers that are trying to help him. I even got away with goading him about religion for a bit. I was tempted to play on a previous comment he made about all the staff being "children of satan"* for a laugh, but I left it.
Hopefully, now that I'll be working 9-to-5 hours I'll get something of a social life back and will be able to post about things other than hostel/new job (outreach worker) encounters. However, due to the current absence of a life...
There was a big metal acro-prop holding up part of the stairs in the hostel for the whole 18-odd months I worked there. It was taken away yesterday as it was found that the slight lean of the prop was pulling the banister away from the stairs, thus giving the bottom step nothing to rest on at one end. It was quite interesting/alarming to stand on the flight under those stairs and watch our heavier residents challenge the building's structural integrity.
Thinking about it, that would have been an interesting Darwin Award. "Hostel worker crushed by fat bloke and half a semi-derelict building".
What I was getting to with this part of the post was that whenever I leave a place, job, whatever, they immediately spend some money somewhere and improve things there. At uni they put phone lines and internet connections in the halls of residence just as we moved out. At the first hostel I worked at I was pissed off with the gaps in building security due to lack of enough cameras, and just after I left they got a new digital system which does it all. And in the other hostel there is now a distinct lack of metal pole to make nervous jokes about when visitors are shown around the building. The place looks vaguely normal.
Then again, it's possible that the staircase will collapse without the acro-prop and they will have to close the hostel down.
Or maybe nothing will happen at all and that bloke's paranoia has just been filtering into my subconscious. Only time will tell.
*My girlfriend helpfully pointed out that if you know your bible, Satan would only sire one offspring - the Anti-Christ. Of course I made this point during a keyworking debate, but he just wouldn't listen to me. Apparently I'm damned.
posted by bulabula at 10/21/2005 11:58:00 pm
1 Comments:
Maybe you should resign and re-apply for your old job with a false identity.
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