I work(ed) as an MRI Tech at a decent sized hospital in Appalachia. I was on night shift for about two years hoping to get a weekend gig at the same hospital as it was close by where I lived at, and it would work well with my school and research I was doing with my professor.
In October, something in me snapped. I didn't like night shift weekdays anymore. I was perfectly fine with night shift on weekends as the grogginess was limited to weekends, and didn't like missing doing things with my friends and family cause of how tired I'd be in the morning. I put in a request to change my shift to weekends, and had it denied because: “They couldn't find anyone else to replace me”.
Now, I had multiple people find out about this and got angry at the admins. The people who had been there the longest, and the ones who hadn't worked there for very long were quietly talking among themselves about why they wouldn't let me transfer (granted, I made kind of a big fuss about it talking among the day and evening shifts to try and turn the tide in my favor and hopefully change the admins minds). The MRI Safety Officer (We'll get to her in a second), the Quality Assurance Tech, and the protocol admin all were asking the other admins why I couldn't transfer, since this really hadn't happened before when someone puts in a transfer request. I had warned my fellow techs that I planned on quitting if I didn't get a weekend shift, and implied it in my appeal to the admins to get my shift transferred.
The imaging admin dealing with this (We'll call her “A”) responded with two blunt quotes. “We can't find anyone to replace him, so he'll just have to wait” and: “He's young, he can handle it”. The admin and two techs that heard this were apparently dumbfounded according to what I was told. How true that is, I don't know. But they were visibly upset when talking about what A said.
I found a travel company that would take me to where I could get paid double the amount of money for less than half the work, so I took it and plan to begin working as a travel tech in a few weeks. I put my letter of resignation in, and began well, slacking off. I came in late, blew my PTO, slept on the job, and brought my laptop in to play video games. (What were they gonna do, fire me?)
This is when I realized how little A looked at my position. I didn't get any calls for a “lack of productivity”, and did get a call asking what was going on simply because I came in late for six days in a row. They had no idea what was going on with night shift at all! So as of typing this, I found many ways to keep my productivity looking high, while doing as little work as possible and being able to get more of my school done.
Now what about the Safety Officer you ask? Well, she apparently was appalled at hearing A dismiss me like this. She recently put in her two weeks as well, which shocked the whole department me and her are both leaving.
The reason why it's significant we're both leaving, is that the department is affectively losing three workers for two leaving. Day shift will have to rotate one to two techs on their already short-staffed shift every week through night shift, and one tech will have to be a Safety Officer, which is somebody who researches various implants to be sure they can go into an MRI, and coordinates anesthesia cases with claustrophobic patients and pediatric patients. They're effectively taken away from scanning.
Overall, I didn't realize what the domino effect would be from me leaving. It's been referred to as a: “Ticking time-bomb” from a few of my day shift colleagues.