working for the weekend…
I’ve been back at work for three weeks now.
Hating every minute of it. Every. Minute.
Not so much the work itself, it’s still the same ol’ crap, but the shift I’m on… In order to accomodate childcare (graciously volunteered by Gram TJ - we’re ever so grateful!!), I need to work 6a-3p and J works 3p-12a, M-F.
Needless to say, it’s a very rough adjustment. We only see each other in passing during the week, when he comes in and I’m walking out the door, and for a few minutes on the two days that our daughter needs to make the trip to work with him when Gram is unavailable. We have our weekends together, but they seem so damn short. That comes from having worked a four-day work week for so long. We were spoiled with three day weekends… We want them back!!
There are pros and cons to trying to go back on the four-day work week on swing shift. We’d work opposite shifts to accomodate the childcare, since it would be on the overlapping Wednesdays and because we would be working late, would likely need to be an overnight thing (unless Gram wants me coming by at 10pm on the days she watches Z…), so we wouldn’t have weekends together anymore. We would, however, be on the same sleep schedule again, so that could partially make up for the lack of same-weekends..
Plus, we could possibly put the squirt to bed an hour later (she goes to bed at 10p right now) on the nights we watch her, it will make for not-quite-so-early mornings.. Although we are infinitely grateful that she is sleeping 7-9 hours a night! (Everyone at work seems to be amazed by that.. I guess for most of the ppl here who have kids, the sleeping through the night thing didn’t start happening until later on.. HAHA! Hail the power of the swaddle!)
Probably the biggest con of this will be that J is out of personal time already this year, and to avoid going 40 hrs into the red for next year (which is what happened this year), in his current department, his manager allowed him to trade overtime for time off. Since their department isn’t ever going back to 4-day work weeks, J would have to come back to my department, and the manager of this department tends to be weird about those kinds of arrangements. Although, strangely enough, I am leaving 2 hours early today and since he knew I worked through most of my lunches this week (going out long enough to grab food, come back and eat it while working, except one day where I wasn’t able to get away to get food at all), he OK’d me not using personal time for the two hours I won’t be here for today, and instead using the hours worked thru lunch to cover them…
Maybe he’s beginning to see he needs to start being flexible to keep everyone from looking for another job? There are already two ppl leaving in less than two weeks, and a third left last week… We’re severly understaffed and it was so busy this week and last that the rest of us started grumbling about how we’re hurting for bodies and it’s enough to make us start looking elsewhere for work… I guess the mumblings got back to management and they’re starting to realize they can’t continue to be completely inflexible with us, else we’ll start leaving in droves.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah, I hate this shift. But, I’m leaving early today. Yay! More time to spend with my sweet girl! She’s growing up so fast…
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