Teachers /Nurses partying in staff room

[Bonabee]

Michael Fabricant has just said on BBC that teachers and nurses were drinking and partying after their stressful shifts during lockdown.
This was in defence of Johnson, Sunak etc.
I know he is a clown but this is so insulting.
AIBU?

I have to say, I manage an NHS team and we did try and celebrate birthdays etc through Covid. Our main base office is fortunately spacious and we signed all the desks 2 m apart so had social distancing. If we had a communal lunch with birthday cake we planned carefully food that could be safely shared such as individual crisp bags and rolls etc. You cannot imagine whilst everyone else was safe at home, how it felt for those who had to go out every day and work in hospitals often with patients with Covid. Personally, we did what we could to stay sane and support each other.

Utter twat.
Out of touch, blundering, insensitive, dishonest twat.

We bloody taught, online, in person, recorded lessons, photocopied worksheets, taught some more and when we stopped teaching, we marked everything that was sent to us. When we weren't teaching, we were fucking packing food parcels and driving them around our city to our poorest families. We have a LOT of poor families.

When we finished our days caring for others, we'd go home and start helping our own children with their home-learning. I have 3 of varying ages.

Had we even the slightest cell of energy left and the inclination to party (ffs) and taken alcohol into school premises, it was instant dismissal. Is this man so out of touch that he still thinks of schools as communal staff rooms with low, spongy comfy seats and ring-stained coffee tables, a kettle on constant, the smell of fag-smoke billowing?

Does he not realise that most schools have business managers that watch over everyone like hawks?

Sorry for the verbal spill. I admit to not having RTFT (I will) but the Tories and their ilk never cease to disappoint me. Their dishonesty is breathtaking.

@Crystalvas yes you would think so but because of staff absences due to Covid if they find out you’ve caught Covid whilst socialising with other members of staff it’s being “frowned upon”. They can’t totally enforce it but the thought it there. I recently had Covid & when occupational therapy phoned me they asked me in great detail about my social life & if I was socialising with staff members.

Meant to add - our staff room has no tables and chairs but instead a sink and a cupboard and a hot water tank. It was closed in the first and second lockdown.

It's now open with a 2 person max at any one time.

We all eat at our desks, in our rooms, usually surrounded by our pupils.

Fuck Off with him.

What a sorry bunch of lying, out of touch, corrupt cunts. Pray God this finally topples them.

Sometimes at 7pm me and my colleague would have a wine on teams after a 8 hr day of online teaching and individual coaching and then crisis meetings with senior leadership

To the PP who said Michael Fabricant MP was joking with this claim- he absolutely isn’t. He is claiming that nurses and teachers were drinking at work during lockdowns. This is his justification to defend the PM for being fined for partying in groups (while that was banned under the PM’s own public health laws).

Video of Fabricant’s claims here: Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak fined over lockdown parties
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61083402

In reality nurses and teachers face disciplinaries including potentially sacking for drinking at work. Can you imagine if staff were caught bringing in suitcases of booze to work.

Not content with making this huge insult, Fabricant’s canny solution to the suitcase problem is that the government should simply provide a bar in Downing Street.

order-order.com/2022/04/12/fabbers-calls-for-a-bar-to-be-installed-in-downing-street-defends-suitcase-of-booze/

@WhiteWriting

What a sorry bunch of lying, out of touch, corrupt cunts. Pray God this finally topples them.

It won't. Because - for reasons I cannot begin to comprehend - people keep voting in these wankers.

Agreed. It's terrifying

I'm a community based nurse and my team still can't have face to face meetings. There are 8 in our team, we haven't sat together in a room for 2 year.

Something I've mentioned many times on these kinds of threads: I didn't even spend time with my (CEV) husband for 8 months of the pandemic because the risk to him was so great. So fuck off with that shot, Fabricant.

And we in education didn't even have it as bad as NHS. But bad enough!

Hospital staff did seem to do a lot of TikTok dances in the early days of the pandemic so I can’t entirely get behind some of the posts on here…

Could we collectively hold this man and his bullshit to account? It is defamatory to our professions. He needs to be sacked and taken to court.

I’m a teacher and I ate my lunch sitting on the floor in the corridor. Because there were limits on how many people could be in various rooms socially distanced (we are a small school with small rooms)- 3 in the staff room, 3 in the library, 3 in the computer suite. Each door I opened, the room was already full. I didn’t want to eat in the classroom as the children ate in there as bubbles couldn’t mix so they couldn’t eat in the hall, so it didn’t feel like a break.

Bollocks! My team haven’t got a staff room & definitely weren’t partying after work each day. Don’t know how low the Tories have to stoop before the public get it into their heads that this government is only working for itself & doesn’t give a toss about anyone else.

We had small areas as staff rooms in my school. Definitely no drinking in them!

@TheKeatingFive

I expect it may have done in a few isolated cases. Hard to say it definitively didn't.

But even if it did, it's not comparable to the number 10 parties

I bet you anything it fucking didn't

I'm a nurse, was redeployed in work in icu in March 2020, it was just awful, heartbreaking. In June 2020 I lost my only child, he had a brain haemorhage and donated his organs, he was 22yrs old. I'm having counselling now, working in icu, losing my son during covid, there was no partying. xo

No. At the end of long shifts caring for dying patients in the most heartbreaking conditions (no visitors allowed and no ventilators available for most) all my colleagues and I wanted to do at the end of a shift was get out as quickly as possible. It felt like running away from trauma, honestly. We were exhausted and broken. We were most definitely not partying. I'm still not recovered from the trauma I experienced in the first wave.

We weren't allowed in the staff room during lockdown. We ate lunch in the class bubble or in our car

I'm sure plenty of people were breaking Lockdown restrictions. Government ministers are held to higher standards than teachers or nurses.

dinozzo

@Florenz

I'm sure plenty of people were breaking Lockdown restrictions. Government ministers are held to higher standards than teachers or nurses.

Except they're clearly not! They expected to just do what the fuck they liked

Our staff room was shut. We still cannot offer hot drinks at meetings.

We had our first face-to-face briefing since Lockdown 1 in February this year - held in the main hall so that everyone can stand in a big circle while the head talks. It's like the world's worst version of the Hokey Cokey.

The A&E staff at our local hospital often ate free pizzas and beer together after long shifts but I wouldn’t call it partying. They were all exhausted and couldn’t actually see their families (many for months).