Jumping thorugh hoops

On Friday, over 4 months after starting employment at Seattle VA, I continued my seemingly endless series of jumps through HR hoops. The week following my initial orientation in September, they switched over to a new type of employee ID badge, all fancy with a computer chip in it for logging on to computers and such. I got one of the old badges, just regular plastic, because I started just before the new system was implemented. I was later informed that all employees with old badges needed to make an appointment to get a new badge, which I dutifully did, about a month ago. But unfortunately, because of mis-checked boxes in HR paperwork completed many months ago, they were unable to give me a new badge. At the same time, they had already taken my old badge, so they couldn't give that back to me either. Instead, they gave me what amounted to a fake badge, which had my picture on top, and a phrase including the words "non-compliant" on the bottom. It was suggested that I ignore the problem and hope no one cared, but, very shortly thereafter my non-compliant badge was determined to be unacceptable. Fortunately, this time all the paperwork errors were fixed, I got a new badge, and now I am compliant.

In attempts to prevent the impending situation of future joblessness, I am working on getting licensed, to make myself more employable. Related to this, I spent this weekend jumping through a licensure application-related hoop. In the state of Washington, to get licensed as a psychologist, you must 1) complete an application, and after this is tentatively approved, you are given the green light to 2) take the national exam (EPPP), and then after that, 3) take a state jurisprudence exam, then you get licensed. I am working on step 1, and studying to prepare for step 2.

When I went to fill out the application, I had all the requirements completed except one-- Washington requires that all health professionals, psychologists included, complete 7 hours of HIV education covering a range of general topics. So this weekend I watched 7 hours of DVDs (checked out from the nursing education library at work), and learned some things that may be peripherally useful to me at some point in the future (e.g., issues surrounding sharing HIV-related information with other healthcare providers), as well as many things that I very much hope will not be useful in my practice as a psychologist (e.g., safe clean-up of blood, sputum, and diarrhea).

This was one of those times that I was extremely glad to be a knitter-- enough attention to the DVDs to get the essential information, enough attention leftover to make about one and a half handwarmers :)