A lot has happened. But really a lot. I often have a lot to tell, but today is really beyond any scope. I won't even try to be brief. That would be hopeless. Old Swiss, it's unbelievable. I'll come back to that at the end. The cow skin and the Swiss.
But all joking aside, we are not here for pleasure. Where do I start? I could write this post as clickbait, at its best. But somehow I don't feel like it. Because it's going to be all right. It wasn't always like this. Not even the last two or three weeks. But then, finally, the mood got going. And a lot of things started rolling. It was long overdue. It just wasn't meant to be. For... reasons.
Well, and to be honest, I'm scared that my parents will fall backwards off the recliner anyway when they read that another care provider has fired me. It's all good, dear parents, we've talked things out and we even had our first team meeting. We are somehow trying to cover November by hook or crook. After all but one more-than-understandable wobble, everyone spoke out for me at 100%, my cards aren't that bad. I think.
The things I don't believe, eh? For being agnostic and atheist, I have quite a bit of faith in God. I prefer to call it faith in the multiverse. But that's probably something for someone else. But the few who knew about it at all probably think I'm definitely crazy. Of course, the situation has weighed heavily on me. In the past, I would have set up my own company, calculated all the costs and risks for three years and clarified the financing with the insurance company. I'm not saying I wouldn't have done it anyway. But whenever I was asked whether I had finally warmed up my old contacts at other care services, they had to listen to my calm "No, I don't feel like it. Something will turn up. Something always does". I first wanted to find out what the reasons for the dismissal were. I hoped for a conversation. Besides, I really didn't feel like changing nursing services again. That always sucks. The burden is on the patient.
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Let's be honest - those who know me know that I always answer honestly and directly when asked - every care service struggles with the same problems. Too little money from the insurance companies (for whatever reason) and so little supply on the staff market that every brainwashed idiot has more on his pay slip than I ever had as a normal employee. No kidding. I know this will make me unpopular with many people. Even among my own friends. But that is my opinion. If you don't want to hear it, don't read my blog. I think over 4,000 euros net a month is a shitload of money. Way too much for the majority of those I've met in the care sector over the years. At my first care service, some of them hadn't even done a respiratory course and didn't understand a word of German. B2 is for asses. Again, don't get me wrong, mea culpa, I'm more of a left-liberal (and green-terrorist) than anything else. But you can't send a nurse to a ventilated intensive care patient who doesn't understand the word "o2". It's all been there. Fortunately, it was a few years ago.
I don't write "o2" instead of "I'm having a really hard time breathing. Before we suction and cough, be so kind and switch the oxygen concentrator to five litres". Maybe I'm just barely able to write more at that moment. It happens sometimes when the saturation is in the basement. By in the basement, I don't mean a children's circus like "Help, my saturation just dropped to 89, I'm dying". No, I'm talking about in the basement. Where your carer dials 911 and 140 seconds later the first ambulance is standing next to you. After five minutes, two emergency doctors and four Sankas are standing in the living room, bundle you up and eight of you (!) drive straight to the next shock room. I still remember the paramedic's words: "It'll be cold for a while until we're in the ambulance. And my comment that at least this way I'll get out for a change is quite nice. I really have to put my two cents in everywhere. The lowest saturation I have ever measured and documented was 76. I don't think I'm squeamish. I really don't. But below 80 it gets nasty. Especially if you don't have your head in such a good shape that you can handle it. Like I said, it was a long time ago, was still at the previous care service. Back then I wasn't as aware of many things about my body as I am now. This particular evening, a borderline experience, I suppose.
My financial blessing only came with my third own company, and even then only after years (correctly, decades) with practically no salary. And a six-figure mountain of debt, personnel responsibility and the sole entrepreneurial risk. I think a little more money is justified. The comparison with the responsibility for my life doesn't work either. That is the job description. A pilot doesn't get 20 million a year because he has the lives of 300 passengers in his hands. An A380 pilot would get 35 million a year. A train driver in passenger transport? To finance that, an MVV ticket would probably have to cost a few hundred euros. No polemics. Just a mathematical extrapolation of the variables. But working seven days a week for 15 years of one's life and not taking a total of four weeks' holiday has to be paid back somehow. Otherwise no one will do it and then the question of salary won't even arise. Because then there are no more employers. It has nothing to do with responsibility or the industry.
Moreover, the unfairness of the situation is not that people in the care sector earn too little money. No. It is the injustice that the sector has somehow brought upon itself. The disproportion that every asshole who comes along earns practically as much as a nurse who works her ass off for me so that my ass doesn't go to shit. While the asshole on duty just hangs lazily on his mobile phone. Or sleeping. And leaves the work to the others. It's not like the drugs would count themselves if it wasn't done. No, then the next service has to do it. If specialists are busy with private things for ten out of twelve hours, you can be as efficient as you want, you won't make up the time. Something falls by the wayside. You have a stressful service at times and I, well, some part of my care falls by the wayside. The burden is on the patient.
Always these special employees. We call this behaviour "colleague pigs". In view of the enormous intelligence of pigs, I find this term not only gender-hostile, but rather inappropriate, but that is really a story for another time. Everyone knows it, everyone thinks it, no one dares to say anything. Because, well, because then they don't want to. They don't even come to me for 4,000 € net to sleep. I am already known as "the heavy patient in Grünwald". It's a well-known fact that I'm lucky to still have 50 kg on my ribs and never leave my bed, isn't it? I understand that. There's always someone lighter than you. If you have ALS, every other patient is lighter than you anyway. Besides, there are enough other care services that set the bar even lower.
To be honest, I find it difficult to blame everything on the "system".
There are ambitious people and comfortable people. If no one says anything, no patient voices his opinion because otherwise he will end up on the street, why should the comfortable colleague pig change? You can't earn 50k net a year more easily. And old swine, I've had a few losers here, too. The biggest losers, on the other hand, were all put out on the street by me. They are now someone else's problem. And I'm sorry about that. That's where I'm an egoist pig. Deliberate choice of word. Wink smiley. That's the way it is. If you don't say anything, you lose. And whoever says something has a hard time. But you can win. Like me. Everything will be fine. We are well on the way to building a good, stable and sufficiently strong team that will finally ensure my long-term care. In the end, everything will be fine. Although my writing was a bit over the top at times. I spoke my mind bluntly every time. And wrote about it. Someone has to say it. And write it down for all concerned. The encouragement I receive is overwhelming. At times I am more than a week behind in answering questions. There are so many. I am happy about it. But it is sad at the same time.
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Writing. Good keyword. My blog. Somehow I didn't realise it wasn't widely known. It's only in every email, in every one of my social media profiles, I spend several hours a day writing on it when my carers are 30 cm away from the screen. The domain name paddys.de is also easy to remember. 5,599 US dollars were offered to me for the rights. Far too little. There would have to be a zero attached to it for me to think about it.
Funny story too, can you still make money with a blog these days? Several people in the social media assumed so. So at this point, at least from me, a clear no. I don't earn a cent with my blog. On the contrary. 100% of the membership fees go to conservation organisations. At the moment that would be
- the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union of Germany (NABU), which has been working to save nature since 1899, here in particular
- a NABU insect sponsorship, because we are all completely unaware that without insects we cannot produce food for ourselves - which then doesn't matter, because without insects the entire ecological cycle collapses anyway; and
- a NABU ocean sponsorship, because this is where we have ruined the most and continue to do so with every piece of marine life we eat, every microplastic-containing product and every (freight or pleasure) shipping, even though the oceans are our biggest CO2 reservoir
- a supporting membership in the Landesbund für Vogelschutz (LBV), because they do great work, also on a regional level. Both the staff of the LBV Munich and the head office in Hilpoltstein have accompanied me on my life's journey and professionally for almost twenty years. LBV is one of my most loyal customers and has always stood by me, even in difficult times. Even when I was fired from my old employer, we found a way to dissolve "my" old contracts and take the customer with me to my new company, which still has a picture-perfect customer relationship. Love goes out.
- Then there is Aktion Tier, which makes no significant financial contribution and dates back to very old times. It is mentioned for the sake of completeness.
And then there are the donations, for which Microsoft banned me. I'll tell you a nice anecdote about that in a minute. These funds literally run into the thousands. But they are earmarked and go to representatives like Sea Sheperd, last year for once to ALS-mobil e.V. or this year to Wilderness International. I don't earn anything with it. On the contrary, I add the same amount that was donated from my own pocket. It's better not to talk about the running costs of my blog. After the servers of HostEurope and IONOS (1und1) collapsed under the load, the blog was moved to our own systems in my company's data centre.
But it's all worth it. We haven't even finished the second week of the campaign and have already collected almost 2,000 euros. If I were to double it today, we could already conserve almost 4,000 euros of rainforest forever. Not only are we protecting a huge biodiversity. This patch of rainforest alone stores around 250,000 kg of CO2. I don't even want to go into detail here. In short: based on the current number of dear donors, our rainforest is already storing more CO2 than we are statistically producing this year. And I think that's great. That's all that really needs to be said, isn't it?
You've somehow missed the action so far. Postponed? Well, let's hope there's still time. Here to go directly to the donation form. Help me to do something sustainably good.
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Maybe it's an industry thing. When I have a new client, I Google him. Not because of the question of whether he is known as a difficult customer. No. As long as the payment behaviour fits according to the Crefo credit report, I'm fine with it. For a much more libidinous reason. Because it interests me.
That's a good thing. Well, now that I think about it, not really. What I'm getting at is that we humans wouldn't be so evolved if we weren't so driven by our thirst for knowledge. That it would have been better for our planet if we had died out before we could have evolved into cavemen, that's something else I'd better tell you some other time. Now we are here and have to come to terms with the fact that we have to quench our thirst for knowledge somehow. If you type my name into Google, my face graces the entire first page. In the first place? That's right. My blog. Someone should try to copy that. Without SEO. Without spending money on advertising. I'm not saying I didn't use the Microsoft Advertising platform for the first time in my life today and plan to spend €600 on a campaign pointing to my fundraising efforts to save the rainforest. But maybe Microsoft finds that seditious or otherwise criminal. So blatantly, in fact, that not only was my ad paused, but my profile was immediately blocked. Oh, what am I talking about, all the profiles of the entire company group. The support chat has a technical problem and a bot that's as dumb as a brick responds to e-mails to customer care. In the meantime, he no longer answers me at all. The fact that the global corporation that bought ChatGPT can allow itself to do this shows how much the individual customer really doesn't give a shit.
I had an interesting thesis. My sis refuted it. The train of thought remains highly exciting. Is it even possible today for an AI to understand the subtitle of my blog? Sex, drugs & all kinds of music. Besides the obvious, sex stands for diversity and a queer attitude to life. I doubt that an AI would be able to recognise that in the context of some of my posts. More likely that drugs in the English language are not only drugs but also medicines. Intriguing as the idea is, the actual cause is in the Microsoft help pages that my sis rummaged through. Microsoft does not tolerate appeals for donations for conservation projects like our rainforest. Well then.
Speaking of which, you may have noticed the new flags up there in the menu. I do my best to revise the AI-generated drafts (for the tech enthusiasts: TranslatePress Pro with Deepl Pro - the software alone costs well over four figures a year). But I am not a foreign language correspondent. What do I know about languages? Quite in contrast to my dearest little sister. Not only is she a trained foreign language correspondent, she also has her own e-marketing agency in Denia (right on the Mediterranean coast of Spain), from where she and her team mainly look after German trade fair clients. And lately, she also has a cheeky blogger who needs three weeks to tell me what happened in the last two weeks. In any case, she is allowed to correct my mistakes. Where has there ever been anything like that before.
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I don't even know where to start with everything else that has happened to my care in the last two weeks. There is the matter of my blog. I said some unpleasant things. A few unpleasant things have happened. To pick on the nature of man again - "nature of man", what an irony - man is sensationalist. If I write something negative today and something positive tomorrow, which post will you think of first when I ask you about it the day after tomorrow? It's simply like that. When we drive past a serious traffic accident, we can recall every detail afterwards, even though we didn't see half of it. Our brain fills the gap subconsciously because we can't stand the emptiness. Nobody remembers the sign "Save the bees" 200 metres away tomorrow.
This said, I would like to take this opportunity to thank three special people from my team in the clearest possible way and in public. What you three have achieved in the last few weeks has been intense. Even if there are still a few hiccups here and there, the care I have received has been top-notch. I wish so much that we can build on this in the future and find one or two more capable staff members who will take work and, above all, hours off your hands instead of just sitting around and leaving you with even more unfinished work. I would like to call you by name, but you know I don't call names. You know you are meant. Let's hope the new plan works.
The plan. As of today, my supply has been terminated as of 30.10. of this year. But there were finally talks. In a large management meeting, the issues that should have been discussed long ago were finally discussed openly. That was a board. As a result, the possibility of continued supply now stands or falls with my team's willingness to compromise. Because we are now urgently looking for energetic reinforcement for my team, preferably with full-time staff. And although the first recruiters will be with me this week and next week, this kind of thing doesn't happen overnight. Good things take time. Getting to know each other, a proper induction and the time until the first assignment, that takes a few weeks and months. We have to get through that time. October is set. November is written in the stars.
I was talking about conversations. Plural. In order to create clarity in the team as well, there was a second one a day later. You might have guessed it already. We had our first team talk. For this one, too, everyone took almost three hours and laid their cards on the table. In my eyes, it was sometimes inappropriately hostile, but I don't want to go into that. In any case, the result for me was very pleasing. Everyone spoke out in my favour. Even those who only have a mini-job with me schedule their three desired Fridays in such a way that they can step in when there is an even greater need than there already is.
If November can be covered, we'll have a party. That's the deal. If not, I'm out on the street.
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If you still haven't donated and hopefully it's not too late, you can give me a grateful smile by participating here:
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Wow! You're still with me. But now I'll give you the promised treat. With the beef and Switzerland. It's spicy, I'm warning you. Better get the towels ready.
PS: When I first saw this video, I was not yet a vegan. I too have a past. And believe it or not, I'm into fast cars. And how I loved my disabled converted 354hp S4. It's in good hands with my dad....
