Mandatory overtime.

Now that the ground rules are out of the way, I think the first thing I should bring up is the thing that best keeps people's nuts in a sling/breasts in a vise.

Mandatory overtime.

With the exception of 1st Watch (on very rare occasion)...everyone feels the weight of it. 4th Watch gets held multiple times a week. 5th Watch gets held multiple times a week. 3rd Watch is almost sure to get held 3-5 times a week (especially on weekends). And 2nd Watch gets held over on less-rare occasion.

And all of this is after volunteers are taken into account. I don't mean a message around the room stating "We're looking for volunteers." I mean sign-up sheets. Does anyone notice while they're signing up for overtime that there's no room on the sheets? It's so bad that people have to sign their names on the borders of the paper. Or in the little crevices where there's no print. Hell, people write over the print. Any number of people up to 20.

And yet we're still so short-handed that people get held over. Or get their lunches and breaks cancelled (especially on 1st Watch). Maybe if the city would hire more people to field/dispatch these 911 calls for non-police matters then we wouldn't be so short-staffed. Administration says they put in requests to City Hall, & City Hall denies most of the slots they want to fill. Who knows.

But if the city DID hire more people than they have recently...where are these people going to sit? We're maxed out on room for bodies. Or, at least, enough bodies to field the thousands and thousands of 911 calls that come in during one 8-hour shift Guess noone considered 11 years ago when the building was designed/built/opened that the call volume would rise with the population.

Or with the rampant use of cell phones that allow unsupervised 3-5 year-olds, who can't spell their own names, the opportunity to play on the phone and invite calltakers to orally stimulate their little nasty, dusty, undeveloped crotches.