Placements

Here's the thing about marketing... real, grassroot stuff, not the frameworks and the decks... you can sit through endless strategy sessions, memorise every acronym they throw at you, and still not know a damn thing until a campaign's live and the client's calling and the numbers are staring back at you.

You learn by doing. Everything else is rehearsal.

Aged Care Placement is teaching me that lesson all over again.

We smashed the quizzes. Nailed the roleplays, more or less... as much as you can "nail" pretending to help a "resident" - often a classmate or manikin - in an made-up situation while narrating like it's a nature documentary. All of it has been leading to the grand stage... Placements.

120 hours. Sixty hours in Aged Care. Sixty in disability.

And Aged Care Placement is upon us.

They split us into three crews, put us in three aged care facilities around the region like some kind of ill-prepared invasion force.

Sixty hours of actual, no-simulation, you're caring for someone's-real-grandparent reality.

You know the black & white. What they tell you at TAFE or Uni.

But what really ran through our minds?

You want to know how we (or I) felt walking in?

Let's run the tape.

Nervous? Obviously. 😧

Feeling like I'd learned nothing at all, despite the binder full of notes? Also yes. 👀

That specific, cold-sweat blankness... the one where your brain just... closes for renovations right when you need it most? Yup.

And underneath all of it, the dread of being the new guy again, the guy who doesn't know where the clean linen's kept, doesn't know the shortcuts, doesn't know anything except how to look like he does.

I'll be writing these up a couple of days after they happen... no live blogging from a an aged care facility hallway, thank you.

Just the daily grind, told straight.

What I did, who I met, what went sideways, what somehow, against odds, went right.

The good. The bad. The genuinely ugly.

This is Individual Support Placement, as lived... through my eyes, with my baggage. Which means, fair warning: there's bias in here. There's some cowardice. And yeah, there's a little bravado too, because you don't survive the first day of anything without lying to yourself just a little.

Let's get into it.