I earn my living as a nurse.
I have been trained in communication skills, have very few hang-ups regarding body image, have to deal with people on a day-in, day-out basis and there is very little to do with computers.
why am I posting here you might well ask?

I'll tell you why.

I'm an Intensive Care nurse, lab techs and microbiologists aside, we are the spods of the health care game, and I'll tell you why.

1) Gadgets.

In Intensive care we use a wide variety of highly entertaining gadgets.
Ventilators with a multitude of settings which range from letting you be very hands on with your patient's care to one which will let you sit reading and picking your nose through the night shift, various pumps, all extremely programmable, the LiDCO, a gadget for monitoring ore cardiac functions than you though existed, Vital signs monitors(not the exact one we use, the ones we have are flashier than this) and the the blood gas machine to name but a few things.

2) Technical Stuff
I'd like to think that it goes without saying that working in ITU calls for a pretty technical knowledge base, in the course of my working day myself and/or my colleagues may be expected to interpret blood results(a process which largely involves looking at numbers) or calculate fluid inputs and outputs for the day in order to reach set parameters when doing haemofiltration(again, this largely involves numbers), for example.

3) Everyone has their own private obsessions which they know possibly too much about than is healthy for one individual.
I can waffle for hours about the merits and numerous near-identical dressings, another is very very keen on auditing EVERYTHING(again, numbers)and another gets very excited about the colour of a patient's sputum and what this may indicate.

And finally 4) In intensive care, the majority of patients are sedated, ventilated and occasionally paranoid. This is so us poor freaks to speak to as few people as possible, quite often the doctors have more to do with patient's families than us, so Intensive Care is one of the few areas of a hospital where the doctors are not the most inarticulate members of staff.

Oh and we work a big windowless unit, we've got better goth's suntans than the average WoW player.

Length? about 48 hours to live, if you're doing well.
( Amorous Badger NAKED BEA ARTHUR PHOTOS 4U, Mon 10 Mar 2008, 23:00, Reply)