Bonecrcker #82 - Women in Power

I used to work the night shift as part of the zombie squad for the inpatient mental health hospital for Cook County (Chicago). One night I walked in, went over the charts, got the patients settled and started to create the next day’s treatment plans, when I notice a black cane in the corner. Now, having knowledge of various things like weapons and knowing that many of our patients are criminal scum, I was immediately suspicious. I pick it up thinking it’s probably a zip gun smuggled on the unit by some dangerous psycho and start fiddling with it. Eventually, I discover it is actually a hidden storage device and extract four or five vials filled with brandy of all things. Of course, I write it up in the duty log and secure the cane in a locked cabinet. By morning, the next shift shows up and I explain what happened to one of the women who is taking over for me. I find out…..it’s HER cane! She turns as white as a ghost as I explain what I found and then goes into this long bullshit explanation about how she bought it at a garage sale and had no idea what was inside (boy is she a lousy liar). I’m like……alcoholic. Anyway, over the next week, I notice that several of the patients are using the cane (note, neither the patients, nor the female staffers need a cane to walk with….all being young and relatively healthy). So, I start to lean on the patients and discover that this wacko staffer is trading the alcohol in the cane to male patients in exchange for sex and drugs. I immediately reported this to my superior (another woman) and the head of the clinic system (still another woman). A month later, I left that job to work on my doctorate. But a year or so later, what do I find, but the female staffer who was doing this sick shit was promoted to the head of that individual clinic while my old superior was made head of the entire system. That system crashed less than a year later leaving no services for the severely mentally ill in all of Cook County (at least those who don’t have money) for quite some time.

This is a clear and specific example of just how big a mistake it is to promote women into positions of power and what happens when you do.

Previous Bonecrcker Index Next

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Related:

Bonecrcker #18 – Three Rules To Follow

Bonecrcker #63 – Most People Who Work in Community Mental Health are Insane