The staff were pretty kind all around, facility was clean.

The dystopian aspect was how many people I saw denied, because they had donated yesterday. You can give twice a week, but have to wait a day in between. I saw at least four or five people get turned away, and they were all pretty upset. The line was extremely long - there are tons of people desperate enough to wait in line for hours to go through the painful process of having their blood sapped out.

I also got a preloaded card as my payment, which has a ton of fees associated with it - I’ll get charged if I use it at an atm or check the balance. I know these cash cards are often also used to pay people who work at like McDonald’s - it just seems like so much of the US is designed to nickel and dime the shit out of the poor.

  • CorruptCheesecake@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    At my local plasma center, the staff are rude as hell and clearly don’t give a fuck about anything but their next paycheck. All they do is gossip on their little airpods all fucking day while BET plays on the big TVs overhead. I overheard them talking shit about me the first time I donated and caught them all staring at me with these goofy ass grins while standing in a group from across the room. In their predictable incompetence they fucked up my arm because I was having an allergic reaction to the chloroprep they use before sticking, and of course none of them cared enough or were even fully conscious enough to notice the slowly developing rash until it was too late. I didn’t think anything of it because here in the south there are nasty bugs and parasites of all kinds everywhere and just living here is a miserable itchy existence most of the time. Even walking in the backyard for a few minutes leaves me with red itchy spots all over my ankles. Anyway, the rash finally got so bad that they were actually forced to do their fucking jobs for once and use their brains. They put in my file that I’m allergic, but it’s been a few weeks now and they still won’t let me donate again until the red spot goes away. It’s just barely getting to the point where I think they’ll let me, we’ll see on Monday. But there seems to be a bit of scarring obscuring the vein now which hopefully won’t be an issue. Knowing my luck I’m probably screwed in some way no matter what, as is the case in every other area of my stupidly infuriating life.