Placements: Sixty Years of Golf, and I Walked Past It

The care was immaculate.

I want that on the record before anything else, because what follows can sound like a complaint.

It isn't one. Period.

On placement, I watched floor staff do the work the way a good line cook runs a busy lunch/dinner service: fast, exact, no wasted motion.

Transfers, toileting, meals, meds.

Nobody fumbled. Nobody dithered. If I ever need someone to lift me out of a chair without dropping me, I want these people.

Most of that floor was staff from the Subcontinent, looking after residents who were mostly white Australian. Our course had spent a lot of hours on cultural awareness, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and Muslim clients in particular, and I'm all for it...

Support work means people from everywhere looking after people from everywhere.

But the thing I actually watched, week after week, wasn't a cultural gap. It was a conversation gap.

The script runs on a loop: How are you feeling? Do you want to eat? Bathe? Toilet? Games? Music session? All of it is about the body and the schedule.

I saw a few real conversations start. Most went nowhere.

And I kept noticing what was sitting in plain sight.

One resident had played golf for more than sixty years. Sixty. That's longer than most of us have been alive, and nobody was asking him about it.

Another man, who barely speaks, one or two words on a good day, had a Croatian flag in his room. Just there. The loudest sentence in the building, and it was on the wall.

Now, here's the thing... I'm no hero in this story either.

I never asked the golfer about golf.

I know nothing about golf. Everyone can talk about Tiger Woods. But really talking about golf requires knowledge of the fine game. I can't talk handicaps, and I was afraid the conversation would sound forced. So I skipped it. I had "in" but walked past it. Same as everyone else on that floor.

What I did do was ask him about the music. He was playing Katherine Jenkins. I'd never heard of her, so I asked. Not as a conversation technique. I was curious. His face lit up. He said he enjoyed her music.

We didn't talk much more than that, but the next day I thanked him for the recommendation... and that small thing, a thank-you for a song, felt like more than any "how are you feeling today" I could've offered.

The flag was the same story. I said, "Ah, Croatia." He turned and looked at me, for a split second. Later I pulled out my phone and learned a few Croatian phrases, the ones that matter at a bed or a meal table: eating, feeding, that kind of thing. And once, just one time, he turned and smiled at me.

That's it. That's the whole result. One smile from a man who doesn't say much.

I'd take it over a certificate.

Here's what I think is going on, and I might be wrong, because I'm new, and new people see things before the job sands the edges off their eyes. Fresh eyes and whatnot...

I think most carers (or support workers or AINs) care. A lot. I also think...

Curiosity is the first casualty of a tight roster.

When you're moving fast, the resident turns into a task list, and the flag and the golf and the knitting stop being information.

I've seen this before, in marketing. Small business starts out, goes all out on service, remembers your name, your order, your dog. Then it grows, efficiency takes over, and one day nobody remembers anyone's anything.

Some of them lose the game.

Aged care probably won't. People keep getting old. You're always in business. Like big banks, telcos, insurers: unless you screw up royally, you're never going away.

There's a story about Steve Jobs... Interviewing a marketer who proudly said he ran the Nike account. Jobs told him Nike had been great for a long time, so the job was simply not to f*** it up.

That's a fine strategy for a shoe company.

It's a grim one for someone's last address.

I'm new. I noticed things. My curiosity radar was going crazy.

Maybe the lens fades. Maybe in two years I'd be the one moving fast, ticking boxes, walking past the flag. Ignoring the golfer. Not hearing the music.

This blog entry will be proof that I did see things.