Brain Injury Mistakes: Part Fourteen of Angela’s Story
Perhaps the biggest obstacle for reemployment for someone with a brain injury is the issue with brain injury mistakes and reliability. Angela was someone who prided herself in the accuracy of her work pre-injury.
That’s what I won awards for. Quality of grade! One of the companies I worked for, every month they did a report as the branch manger, you got what they called the quality of grade. So the QOG and the highest you would get was a 5 unless you were me and then you could get like a 5.2.
Angela’s Pre-Brain Injury Mistakes and Reliability
One of the most important things in evaluating the credibility of what Angela tells us about before and after the accident, is to be clear just how exceptional Angela was before. In contrast to today, she excelled in high stress, high attentional environments. We don’t just know that because Angela tells us that, we know it because what is said about her by the others she worked with. Al Smith (not his real name) was her superviser in the job she had at the time of the accident:
She had an amazing talent, an amazing ability to communicate with borrowers, coordinate her loan officers, many times she would go the extra mile. You know, she won multiple associate of the month awards, multiple associate of the quarter awards. You know, she had that — you know, she never needed to come back and say, you know, she could be forceful without having to be forceful, she had that ability to require those things and just not have to harp or be mean about it.
You know, she was always very upbeat, very smiley, you couldn’t ever frazzle her, you couldn’t ever make her upset. Even when loan officers would turn in just the biggest pieces of trash for loan files, she was always very happy and would go back and just give a list of things, and many times, you know, she would offer to collect those things for them.
We actually, the inaugural — it’s been so long I can’t remember exactly what we named it, but it had to do with stars, the shining stars, she won the inaugural one and we kind of named it after her because of her smiling face and nothing ever got her down.
Q. You said that you ranked the processors A, B, and C and A being the best?
A. Uh-huh.
Q. Where was Angela before her accident?
A. She was an A plus, exemplified by the awards that she won.
Post Accident and Brain Injury Mistakes and Reliability
As a result of her accident and because of her brain injury mistakes that award winning reliability would be gone.
Q: When you got stressed, when there got to be two or three people waiting what would happen to your reliability, your ability not to make mistakes in that situation?
Angela: Very, very poor.
Q: And why would it be changed?
Angela: Well for a number of reasons. I’d be concerned about the people in the line, like from the standpoint of humanity, like I would be concerned that I was keeping them from something that was important and because there’s multiple things going on I would be distracted from what I was needing to do.
Angela talks about her brain injury mistakes and reliability at work:
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