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Covid hit NYC. All non-essential surgeries in the country were then cancelled.
Many hospitals in other parts of the country found themselves no major covid outbreak and no elective surgeries.
The nurses had fuck all to do. So they made TikTok dances.
Nurses have fuck all to do most of the time...like lots of classes of workers.
Firefighters have fuck all to do most of the time. Cops (outside of a select few neighborhoods in a select few cities) have fuck all to do, whence their ability to respond to midday noise complaints and ability to camp bars waiting for a guy to slightly stumble or blow a .06. Lots of lawyers do fuck all most of the time, they just cram everything around trials. There are lots of "congestion professions" where the flow of work is very much irregular, but not having enough personnel at critical times is extremely negative, so the average period of time is a person doing nothing.
I pretty strongly disagree with this statement, at least when it comes to nurses. I cannot speak to the other professions, but all the nurses I know are fairly overwhelmed and overworked, and when they ask management to hire more nurses, this request is almost uniformly denied. Perhaps the one unifying theme among these nurses is that they all work in large hospitals, and as a result there is probably a much more steady stream of patients coming in, and therefore management is better able to select the appropriate number of nurses without needing to hedge for irregular patient flow. Perhaps in other settings, such as at a small-time pediatrician's office or in hospice care, the work is more variable and thus there exists more downtime.
Lots of people say their job is overwhelming and hard. IDK. I recently spent 5 days in the hospital and anytime I'd go get water from the water station there'd be a half dozen nurses just chilling. Also whenever you press your little button they typically come in less than a minute even for the trivial "this machine is beeping" reason.
I think the reasons for nurses feeling this way are pretty obvious: 1) 12 hour shifts are standard, and horrible; 2) The average shift probably will have at least one "surge" period where all the patients a nurse is assigned press their little buttons at almost the same time; and 3) Nearly all-female workforce creates a strange dynamic where that kind of victim mentality enters a feedback loop, as also seems true of schoolteachers.
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