Keeping My Hopes Up

My old job on evening shift has come back up for bid. Still in the Adseg unit, just on a different shift and doing different things. Taking the knuckleheads outside for recreation. It was what I did for four years before coming to day shift. It's not a bad job, in retrospect. I was getting pretty tired of doing rec all the time. But after the craziness of day shift it will probably seem like a vacation.

It's funny. I think in the long run I worked harder and more constantly on evenings. And I had alot more "hands on" contact with the offenders (and thus more uses of force) than I have right now on day shift. On an average day we took out four rounds of eight offenders out to the rec yard. That's thirty two times putting the cuffs on and taking them off. Add a medication pass or sometimes two and you might double that. One real busy day I counted that I applied and removed seventy sets of handcuffs.

But I'm alot more stressed on day shift. Too many eyes watching to see if all the i's are crossed and the t's are dotted, I guess. On evenings if we didn't screw up, we never saw anybody else all shift some nights. A lieutenant might wander down every now and then if the weather's nice to see how things are going. But for the most part, they left us to do our job because they knew we knew how to do it. There's only a couple people left out of my old crew down there now. If I get the job, I'll have to see how they work and how I can work myself back in with them. And I'd have to change my sleeping habits all over again. Gonna be a cranky Rev.

I hope I get the job. It will probably be at least a week before I know if I got it or not and another two weeks after that before I start.

It's going to be a long week. Or possibly three.