The Continuing Adventures of Just a Waiter

 We walk a fine line in the building that I work in and it can get frustrating at times.  That is especially true for those of us in resident relations who work the front desk because we see pretty much everything that goes on in the building.  There are several things that make our work frustrating.  While, yes, we are there to be helpful and make our residents' lives are relaxing and stress free as possible, it gets difficult at times to get people to understand that we are not a hotel nor are we a nursing home.  In independent living, we don't have medical services.  Those services are engaged with outside providers.  While we do work with the providers, that does not mean we have anything to do with their whereabouts or their schedules.  Finding them is not our job.  That's between the resident and the care provider.  Yes, we will do what we can to locate them when needed, but it's not always a priority for the front desk when we have a million other things that we need to get done.  If they need medical attention, I can call EMS for them but that's about it.  9 times out of 10, people feel better very quickly when I mention EMS.  It's not that we don't care, but that's the setting residents and their families have chosen for them to live in.

Another thing that gets frustrating is that we can't tell a resident not to do something unless, of course, it is illegal.  This is really hard at dusk, when sun downers will kick in.  If a resident wants to walk out the front door on their own and go somewhere, there is really nothing we can do to stop that.  Yes, we do our best to divert the resident's attention to something else and discourage them from leaving, but in the end, we cannot stop them.  As callous as that may sound, that is one of the dangers of independent living.  We've had residents walk out of the building and some have walked miles away through heavy traffic with nothing but their walker.  We do our best to go out and catch them before they get too far away, but we cannot legally stop them.  They are independent.  And that gets very frustrating.

The reason these things are so frustrating is because we love our residents.  We don't want anything bad to happen to them.  But, being independent living, sometimes there is little we can do to curb situations.  They have rights and we cannot infringe on them.  We try and keep them as safe as possible, but our powers only go so far.  Luckily, disaster hasn't really happened yet (knock on wood) and I pray that continues.

That is all.