Pros
The employee who trained me is outstanding. Wish there were more like that one. Work location. It's a job.
Cons
It's a job that'll eat you alive. My department is understaffed and there is no plan to change that. You can't simply leave at the end of your shift because you never get all your work done. There's a lot of overtime opportunity. The bench is staffed by 1 employee per shift (3 shifts). There is no backup for illness or vacation or whatever. Good luck getting your time off request. There's no one to cover for you and do the work when you're gone. Workload is incredibly high. Expect to experience burn out. Employees who quit are the ones who've been on the job the shortest time. Employees with 15+ years on the job tolerate the conditions because they've become used to it. The computer system is museum ready. The LIS is DOS-based. Printers are dot matrix. Middleware? There is none. There is no auto-verification of noncritical results. Reviewing and resulting is all done manually. Tedious and slow. Cannot pull a worklist for the bench. You run the specimens you have and hope you've got everything that needs to be run. Working the pending list involves pulling a list for each test. Cannot pull a pending list for the entire bench. Again, slow and tedious work. There are bullies in management, lead tech, and coworker positions. Devious and underhanded. Rude and intrusive. Spying and listening in on conversations. Looking for information to use against someone. Some employees behave like they're in grade school, complete with temper tantrum over a perceived slight. Employees are so concerned about retribution and/or losing their jobs that no one stands up to the bullying. People look the other way when the bully is active. Instruments are old. Analyzers are selected based on whatever is cheapest. Not what is the most effective, efficient, or user friendly. You get stuck working one bench. When you're hired, you'll be told you'll cross train to work other benches within the department but that doesn't happen. With the chronic understaffing, they can't "afford" to allow you to train on another bench. You're told to cross train in your spare time, when work on your bench is slow. Trouble is, the workload never slows. Expect to see uneven workloads within and across departments. The workload to FTE ratio varies big time. Some benches have 2-5 or more employees while another bench has one person doing the maintenance, the work, and answering the phone. You may observe casual conversations on one bench while an employee in another is running as fast as possible like a caged hamster on a wheel. Some employees work off the clock in order to get their work done. Specimens are uncapped before and after processing. Very unsafe and messy.
