I’ve been thinking about this thread, going back over somethings that happened long ago. I once serviced the CT’s at 3 small hospitals, Tarzana, Encino and Sherman Oaks in CA. It should have been a service guys dream. Good equipment, medium patient volume, almost no patients at night or weekends. All very close together so I could do maintenance on all 3 CT’s in the same evening. Perfect… except…
There was a problem at Tarzana with the staff. At the time I didn’t realize there was a narcissist in the group causing all the strife but I was well aware there was strife! This thread has opened my eyes to this memory.
Service guys talk, we’ve all serviced CT’s where there were staff problems. It always made our lives far more difficult than was necessary. Since CT techs were usually female the B* word was thrown around a lot. A co-worker or my boss might ask “How’s your B* site?” My reply would be “the B*es are still fighting!” Not very nice but it was a way of separating “our guys” from hospital politics.
Almost always the technologists at a hospital with problems divided into “camps”. The service guy always… I mean ALWAYS became a pawn in such battles, a possession of one group or the other. Bribery was common, being taken to lunch or my favorite pizza waiting when I was scheduled to do a site visit. Since I was single, I’ve been invited to weekend outings or to dinner for more personal encounters. That sort of thing was also common.
This was a trap… No matter which camp I were perceived as supporting (whether I did or not)… the other camp made the service guy enemy #1. They would immediately begin a back stabbing campaign with management. This usually included claiming the CT was broken when it wasn’t, lie after lie, the service guy was slow in responding to a call, he failed to do this or that… in short I was the worst service guy in the world and had to go. If management bought into this bs then the service contract became an issue. A service contract was worth $250K to $1million a year, depending on the particulars.
I realize now it wasn’t just Tarzana. I’ve had other sites (hospitals) through those years where one CT tech was the real problem and that person was a narcissist.
I was never good a personal politics in situations like that. It took some time for me to realize I was going to be the loser in what ever happened in a hospital at war. Because it always involved more than the CT staff. Sometimes the whole radiology department, friends in other departments were dragged into such a war. I’ve gotten snotty comments from hospital staff I didn’t even know, housekeeping, cafeteria people. As usual, that person would be friends of somebody in CT.
This is one of the reasons I preferred to service CT’s at night, after hours when no one was around… At such a site I tried to limit my conversations to the radiology manager and the chief technologist and stay out of the line of fire of any bs going on.
How these situations were usually handled by companies like mine? Big money was at stake, 1/2 a million dollars is nothing to sneeze at. A site like Tarzana would get a new service guy every 4 to 6 months, that’s about how long it took someone to be a chosen enemy of one camp or the other. My boss, and his boss understood exactly what was happening so internally it was no reflection on the me or the coworkers that followed after me. It was just part of doing business.
Service guys, we each handled it in our own way. Me, I took pride in my work and was always disappointed in giving up a site, even a hostile site, like I failed somehow. During those years I just shouldered my disappointment and figured they were all a bunch of assh($#es and moved on.
Sort of funny… The guy to took over responsibility for Tarzana after me handled things very differently. A few months later he was still kicked off the site like I had been but he had fun on the way. I drove to Ontario CA one night to pick up some parts for Encino. This guy had parts waiting also and asked me to pick up his and drop them by Tarzana. I installed my parts at Encino, did other work then drove by Tarzana. I was just going to leave his parts in the computer room, didn’t know if he was going to be there or not. Anyway, I opened the door and walking into the patient scanning room. All I could see was his butt in the air. He was having sex with one of the techs on the CT table the patients lay on while being scanned. They never even saw me. I left the parts by the door and drove home. He called me at home later that evening… I never let him hear the end of it, of course I told some of the other guys. We teased him for months… When he was pulled off the site by our boss he said “We all knew this day was coming but I had fun getting here!” Actually, what he said was a bit racier… but I’ll leave that to your imagination.
Anyway, thought I’d share how one narcissist could keep a work environment hostile and just some of its ramifications… I hated servicing a CT in such a situation, the constant tension and strife, knowing at some point I’d become someone’s enemy whether I wished it or not, and the inevitable fallout.
Even worse, though I never saw it, I knew the patients suffered from such situations also. How could they not when the people scanning them were at each other’s throats?
Added… don’t get me wrong, sites like Tarzana were not the norm… I’ve had a lot of sites where I became close friends with the whole staff, great people to work with, even became personal friends and saw them socially outside the hospital. It was a pleasure to get a service call from a great site.
