Lamh Foistenach Abu! Well I guess I’m gonna be the one here to disagree. I have worked in healthcare 38 years as a nurse, and folks it might be harsh, however when you see folks come in and someone else stays home that is harsh. I have driven in all type of weather to get in, to find someone who lives 3 blocks away from me stay home. Sick people deserve the best. My hospital will put us up in either available rooms, or local hotel rooms, but for every person who calls in, someone gets to stay and work a double. Imagine your mothers open heart surgery being delayed because someone stays home. Perhaps the trains were not running, however most of the staff showed up anyway. I have left for work at 2am and drove 30 miles at 10 miles an hour...but the patients come first.
“I have driven in all type of weather to get in, to find someone who lives 3 blocks away from me stay home. Sick people deserve the best. My hospital will put us up in either available rooms, or local hotel rooms, but for every person who calls in, someone gets to stay and work a double. Imagine your mothers open heart surgery being delayed because someone stays home. Perhaps the trains were not running, however most of the staff showed up anyway. I have left for work at 2am and drove 30 miles at 10 miles an hour...but the patients come first.”
Sounds a lot like the horse in Animal Farm.
Lamh Foistenach Abu! Yep. You hit it spot on.
I'm a nurse, and that just happened to me 2 weeks ago.
Contrast this with other area hospitals that made way for employees to stay at the hospital ~ very common during these storms.
BTW, the story is this hospital never informed anyone but the doctors of the special hotel rates so nurses who stayed over actually slept on tiled cement floors.
The depth of the snow throughout the Metro area varied from 28" to 48" (by the time the last storm rolled through). We didn't get dug out around here for two weeks and then it took a large Komatsu frontloader (with a thousand horse engine on the back).
Same with parts of Montgomery county, and the residential areas of DC. Many residential streets simply never got dug out.
Like to point out something very important here, residents of DC pay an income tax. They also pay (directly or indirectly through landlords) substantial property taxes. It's the taxpayers money that's used to clear the roads.
In order of priority the DC government cleared the interstates, then the main roads around Capitol Hill (for Nancy Pelosi), then the main roads around the White House and Smithsonian.
Then they began working on the primaries where you find such places as Washington Hospital Center (WHC).
WHC is a nonprofit private foundation. IT PAYS NO TAXES OF ANY KIND.
See where I'm going. WHC, complaining about how its employees got to work, was dug out two weeks before they were! Yet, they paid nothing.
From the standpoint of fundamental equity and fairness (even Republican fairness if you will), WHC doesn't have a leg to stand on. They paid nothing to get dug out yet their employees paid to do that even when they got no service at all for their taxes.
In the future it'd be better to LEAVE WHC piled to the ying-yang with snow and ice and dig out the taxpayers!
I spent a lot of time digging neighbors out of the ice and snow because they thought it was OK to drive on ice without ESC.
It's not.
You would have ended up in the 7 foot drift around the corner ~ and there'd been no one who could help you.
It seems to me you have no idea what happened around here!