I was so relieved sending that resignation email. I hate that it took me so long to do it.
I work at a small county emergency dispatch center. They have lost 4 out of 8 full time employees in 1.5 months.
For clarity I have 2 bosses. The head of dispatch and the supervisor. The supervisor is in charge of making the schedule. Shift A works Sunday-Tuesday . Shift B works Wednesday-Friday. We get alternating Saturdays off. 12 hours shifts. All our extra hours worked goes into comp time until we recently got overtime pay.
These are just a few things that have happened over the last year and management just seems to be getting worse.
• My supervisor doesn’t pick up any shifts. For 3 months they took off every Saturday they were scheduled.
• Supervisor forgetting the 1 time they filled in a shift, showing up 4 hours late, and calling another employee 10+ times in the middle of a doctors appointment telling them they needed to come in.
• 2 months without overtime pay as promised. I personally have 55+ hours I haven’t been paid for.
• On more then one occasion people were told they were the only ones that could possibly cover a shift only to find out later that the supervisor had never asked anyone else.
• 18+ hours shifts and 6 hour turn arounds. These were common but rarely coexisted.
• Flipping people back and forth from day to night shift every week for months.
• Supervisor calling people in 2-4 hours early so that they could leave early.
•$80 in federal income tax taken out for the whole year. No one could give me an answer as to why and they aren’t willing to change it.
• Supervisor and head of dispatch starting rumors and leaking anonymous complaints.
• Working 6+ hours alone dispatching for the whole county. This means calls, dispatching units, status checks, confirming warrants, entering warrants, running criminal histories, and so much more.
• I was asked to work 3 hours alone at the busiest point of the day with just a trainee. Luckily I told them that I didn’t get paid for training and that I wasn’t taking the liability. Afterwards I found out my coworker had messaged them 5 minutes before they messaged me that the trainee was in no way ready and was overwhelmed.
When these concerns were brought up with my supervisors boss (the head of dispatch) their response was they couldn’t do anything about stuff they didn’t know about. I know for a fact that I am not the first person to make these exact complaints and tell them that if management didn’t change good people would keep leaving. Instead the majority of my message was ignored and it was turned around on me that I should be able to train new people (despite not making shift lead pay).
People have complained for years about the same things I have and nothing has changed. We’re constantly being told “it’s going to get worse before it gets better” as an excuse.
I save lives. I’ve heard people die. I’ve consoled family members while my heart was breaking with them. I had stress dreams for months. I was never offered debriefings (like we should have been). I love dispatching and I truly believe this Jon would have been 1000x better without it’s current management but nothing will ever change out here.
This place is sinking and I’m not going with it.