Scheduling Nightmares

Don't you love it when people decide to mess with your life without asking you what you think about it first? Fun, isn't it.

(Insert unamused face here...)

Matt works for a law enforcement agency here in the valley and over the last 3 weeks or so they have been messing around with the work schedule. Most of the officers have spouses/kids that they have to work around and it's a pretty delicate balance to keep everyone in a work schedule that works for their personal situation. For example, we work opposite schedules with me getting to work at 5:30am and trading off the kids at around 2:30pm. Everybody gets a manageable amount of sleep (mostly) and the kids get to spend all their time with either mom or dad instead of going to a day care or babysitter. It's not ideal, but it works for us and where we're at right now.

Now they've decided to change the schedule and apparently they have given very little thought to how this will effect their employees (it usually helps if you ask them about it before you change things...). We thought we were done with this last week when they had the new bid. But NOOOOO, now they're talking about going to 12 hour shifts...making things even worse than with the schedule they just put out a week ago.

In short, this is why our lives have been in turmoil the past few weeks and why I've had little motivation to write anything. My mind has been incredibly preoccupied with the whole business and I've taken to holing myself up in the sewing room in my spare minutes so I don't have to think about it. (On the upside, the quilt top got finished!)

Matt has spent every waking moment (and a lot of ones where he should have been sleeping) thinking about this schedule and trying to figure out a way to keep it the way it was and still meet the new requirements. He presented some of his ideas to his sergeant a couple weeks ago and that didn't really go anywhere, but I guess one of the other officers mentioned it to the department head and he asked to see what Matt has been working on. He e-mailed it out to him this morning so it's out of our hands once again. I've got my fingers crossed that this guy will see the big picture and do something a little more reasonable. If you can spare a little prayer for us, it would be greatly appreciated!

In the meantime, we're trying to figure out how we're going to get Matt to his last class to finish school. They turned him down for the time off he needed to attend class.

(Insert another unamused face here.)

We'll not talk about that. I'm still angry about it.

Anyway...hopefully this will all work out and we'll be getting back to the happy fun posts again.

Now excuse me while I go back to pinching myself until I to wake up from this scheduling nightmare to find that life is back to normal.