Cranky rant.
There are times I just DON'T like Kev's job. See, when he first took the job, he went for a supervisor's position. Ultimately, the pay would be lower. Dispatchers make killer money, as they get paid time and a half, and in some cases, double time, for working odd hours. Kev chose the supervisor's position for the family - it offered more family friendly hours. No phones ringing in the middle of the night saying "Dude, be here in an hour, okay?", stuff like that.
Of course, as time went by, I came to realize that the supervisor's position didn't eliminate the suck hours, it just offered him more notice for the suck hours. I recently got a page-long email from him. What was it? It was his July schedule. His hours are all over the place. Lots of 12 hour shifts, and some in which he works all night, gets off at 7AM, and has to be back 8 hours later. Our family outing on July 4th is cancelled, church is out of the question some weekends, as his schedule neatly prevents him from attending the Saturday night service AND the Sunday morning services, and he narrowly missed having to work on Alexander's 5th birthday.
So the suck hours continue. The "advantage" to being a dispatcher is that of slightly more notice, as I said, and the "advantage" that I like even more. Since he's a supervisor, he's classified as salaried. Although he does get paid hourly. So when he works a 12 hour shift, they don't have to pay him overtime. He makes his regular hourly wage, while the dispatcher at the next console, who is classified as "hourly" and working the same shift as Kev, is making time and a half. I'd like to see them pull that stunt with a dispatcher. A union rep would be pounding on the door with a phalanx of lawyers and a cat-o-nine-tails before the first hour was up.
Sigh. It's frustrating to me, because I feel like Kev gets the short end of the stick here, and that makes me crazy. (Of course, I'm biased. I think he deserves an insane amount of money, 12 weeks of paid vacation a month, and a company Ferrari. He's just that awesome.) Okay, rant over, and I feel slightly better.
1 comment:
Of course, I make hourly about $2 more than the dispatchers.
I don't have to deal with the stress of working the different positions they work (police dispatch, fire dispatch, sheriff's dispatch, info, etc).
I get to go to conferences and seminars out of town occasionally, I get to be the content manager of our website at work.
I get to participate in designing and maintaining our intranet site.
I make in a year working my regular hours or a little more what the dispatchers have to work OT a lot to make in a year.
I get to be responsible for lots of different back-end stuff, which is really cool.
I got to design an educational brochure about 9-1-1 that we've had distributed at the police sector offices, at neighborhood meetings, etc.
If I need to take an comp-day or a vacation day, I can usually do so with very little notice - whereas the dispatchers need to give at least 2 weeks.
If I really need a day off for an emergency and don't want to call-in sick (but I would, that's what they're for), I could most likely get the other supervisors to cover for me.
And, the other supevisors get the freaky scheduling also - it's not just me. It's summer, so people are taking vacations, one of the supervisors is off on sick leave. And the more OT I work, I can either make more money (granted at straight-time), or I can take it as comp-time and use that to take time off later, to have more time with my family.
All-in-all, as a supervisor for the past 5 years, I've worked considerably less overtime than I would have as a dispatcher.
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