Nelson's Column, Bolg, Blog, whatever...

Bloody arsing students. Is it me, or are they all useless whingeing crybabies who reckon they need to be spoonfed everything on a plate?

Teaching students used to be fun. They’d be so keen to suck up to you that you could tell them any old crap and they’d be grateful, then they’d all get squiffy at the firm party and the pretty ones would sit on your knee. You could humiliate them on ward rounds, cancel teaching sessions, leave them to finish the clinic, and they’d love you for it.

But as with so much of the world, it’s all become completely arse about face. Can you believe that the Middle Bit of England Medical School now routinely asks them for feedback? I mean, asks THEM!!? What the arsing hell is that all about? As if anyone gives a flying badger’s rectum what they think about anything, let alone the ‘quality of their teaching’.

Here’s a few examples of ‘feedback’:

“Mr Nelson frequently failed to turn up for appointed tutorials and was frequently rude to patients on ward rounds.”

“At first I thought Mr Nelson was trying hard to memorise my name badge, but I soon realised he was just staring at my chest.”

“The only thing Mr Nelson said to me during my entire eight-week attachment was that radiologists are all gay. My father is a radiologist.”

And I’m like: where are they getting this nonsense from?

Any students reading this? Right - here’s the deal. I supply the gems of wisdom honed through years of experience at the very highest level in the greatest profession on God’s earth, and you supply the gratitude. That’s it. Class dismissed!

Arse, arse, ARSE! I’m so cross that somehow the word ‘arse’ is no longer adequate to express my rage. As a result of our trust’s massive deficit, there’s a whole load of cost cutting going on. And like any trust, they spend money on tons of pointless things that achieve nothing, like anaesthetists’ SPA time, and the Department of General Medicine.

But of course, rather than clamping down on such wasteful spending, they decide to tinker round the edges and punish the hard-working, productive part of the hospital, in a way that will impact directly on frontline patient care.

That’s right. They’re going to make me SHARE AN OFFICE.

And not content with this act of vandalism that strikes at the very core of the NHS and its vulnerable patients, they’ve decided that the person I should be made to share with is none other than Dweeb knob mechanic JOHNSON.

Of course, he thinks it’s a great idea, given that his current office is a broom cupboard with no windows next to the mortuary. They’re going to put his desk where my sofa used to be, where I would sit during a snatched moment of peace in my hectic schedule and deface copies of BMA News. Now I will have to sit at my desk with nothing to look at but Johnson and all the framed pictures of his hideous wife and ginger children.

I mean for arse’s sake, how’s that going to work? Me - a right-thinking, pinstripe-wearing proper surgeon and Son of Thatcher - sharing an office with some soft-left beardy sandal-wearing aging hippy who smells faintly of compost and dilute urine.

How can such a disparate people ever work productively together? I mean, just give me ONE example.

Arsington arsey McArse. Talk about bad luck! I mean, if I’d known that some massive cloud of volcanic ash would paralyse the whole airline industry when I booked my leave then I could have got in on it.

Still, no point crying over spilt milk. I shall just have to knuckle down, invoke the good old British Dieppe Spirit (er, Dunkirk - Ed) and just accept the fact that I’m stuck here working in the hospital when I could have been marooned in Barbados.

Seems like loads of other people were away when the crisis hit, lucky sods. No trouble parking this morning. Nice and quiet around the hospital. Of course all the arsing patients managed to turn up. Takes more than an apocalyptic act of God to stop them pouring through the doors. Still, as I toil away, I am comforted by the many hilarious tales of woe that have befallen some of my dearest colleagues.

Dweeb beardie Johnson, who took his ugly wife and all his various ginger children on a super smug low-carbon holiday by train to southern France gets totally stuffed when all the trains go on strike. 

So faced with the choice between a longer holiday in the sunshine, or looking up old men’s knobs in a darkened room, he obviously chooses the latter. So after a nightmare journey involving 52 different buses, he arrives at the channel only to find that he can’t get a ferry crossing and has to be rescued by a Navy warship en route from Afghanistan, and spends the next six hours stuck in a cabin trying to explain his pacifist views to a messed-up combat veteran, who just stares into space saying “you weren’t there, man” and playing with a bayonet.

Dan The Fat Gasman was on one of his very dodgy-sounding single man holidays to the Far East, and the airline offered him the following route home: Bangkok-Singapore-Sydney-Melbourne-Sydney-Aukland-Los Angeles-Pigsnuckle, South Dakota-Vladivostok-Tashkent-Kandahar-Ulan Bator-Kuala Lumpur-Bangkok.

Meanwhile, the Headmaster went to some Arse conference in Krakow, and being a total cheapskate travelled via THAT airline. You know, the one whose corporate customer care motto is ‘Now get off the fecking plane’. The one that will sell you a ticket to Copenhagen, but drop you off in Sweden - which is a whole other country. Anyway, he rang them up to see if they’d give him a few quid for a sandwich, seeing as he had been stuck for three days at an airport which consisted of a piece of tarmac and a couple of cow sheds. They suggested that (a) if you only pay £2.50 for a ticket you can’t expect masses of compensation if things don’t work out, and (b) that he feck right off. Plus they sent the boys round to give him a good kicking. And they charged him £5 for being beaten up.

So I popped in to see Johnson and have a quick chat about the merits of public transport. He just stared into space saying: “You weren’t there, man. You just weren’t there…”