Been on 10 hour shifts over a year! With some Saturdays thrown in. Finally let up this week with some 9 hour days. Looking at 8.5 today. It sucks the life out of you!
I'm SUPPOSED to be on a 6 on / 2 off, 8 hour a day with rotating days off shift. In my department, we are down to THREE of us (not including the supervisor...who SHOULD BE STEPPING UP AND ADDING HERSELF TO THE ROSTER, but isn't). It's 24 hours a day MANDATORY coverage, so someone has to be there at all times. Minimum staffing should be no less than TWO people on duty at any given time.
I'm an LEO with less than 10 months until retirement and I chose to spend the last two years of my career in dispatch, kind of a "winding down from working the road" move. After all, I'm almost 56 and I can't keep up with the 15 - 30 year old criminal element anymore. I work in the inner-city projects of a major city and we are always getting the worst of the worst calls. Our dispatch center is BUSY getting constant calls ranging from: "My toilet won't flush" to "person(s) shot." One person CANNOT handle the job, it's practically impossible, especially when things ramp up and you have multiple incidents going on at the same time, but they EXPECT us to do it solo anyway. Talk about a job burning someone out. It takes ALL of my days off to recover from a week's work. I was off Weds/Thurs this week and I spent most of my time in bed sleeping, just trying to recover. This morning, I feel pretty good, but I go in today at 1500 hrs to start the process all over again.
I promised my dad that I would try to go my full-term (31 years) before he passed last December, but God knows I want to file for a stress disability TODAY and be done with it. My Dr. more than once said he wants me out of there and will gladly fill out the disability paperwork, but then there's the promise to dad and it's only 10 months.
According to my retirement system, APRIL 1ST 2023 is when I'm eligible to retire.
