Five minute gap.

Hi everybody.

Just wanted to pop in and say hello. I'm not abandoning Talers and all my friends here as I have in the past when life got in the way. And I am going to come in whenever I have some spare time.

The truth is this is the first time I've turned my computer on in over a week. I still don't even know if I've got a penny left in the bank (haven't been paid yet)because I haven't had five minutes spare to check my bank account. I put popping into Talers above doing that.

I'm afraid the new job isn't what I expected it to be. It was supposed to be my job of a lifetime. In reality, if I carry on like this it's probably going to cost me my liftime. :-) I haven't had a day off since I started, I expected that, they told me that they'd backed up. What I didn't expect was the dangerous staffing shortage that we have and as a manager, (along with the other managers in the business,) we have to take up any calls that aren't filled.

Since the day I got my clearance to work I have been delivering care from seven in the morning, then working nine until five in the office and then delivering care until eleven o clock at night. When I deliver care, I only get paid the rate of a general carer. On three occassions they've even made me leave work a couple of hours early, or arrive a couple of hours late into the office to continue delivering care.

It's ridiculous and I'm about ready to drop. I had a major melt down last night when the sat nav misled me onto the motorway and drove me twenty two miles before I could turn around, I had fourteen clients waiting for care and I was completely overwhelmed.

Today my boss has taken a couple of calls off me from ten until twelve to give me a short break. But I'm working again from twelve until eleven and I had a seven o clock start.

Sorry to moan, guys. I'm still glad to be back in employment and part of the problem is my own doing. Out of twenty seven applicants last week I only chose six for interview and out of those six none were acceptable. We could have had more people in training by now if it weren't for me. Something that has been passed on by my superiors. But when I took the job on I told them my main focus was going to be on hiring good carers not just anybody with a pulse prepared to wipe backsides out of desperation.

Whoever said that life is easy? I wanted a busy job, I've got a job and am working 16 hours a day seven days a week. None of the other managers have had any time off while I've been with the company, I dread to think when their last day off was. And the carers make me sick. Christmas day and New Years Eve are triple pay ... you should see them all fighting to take on extra calls. I rang forty six carers on Friday asking them to help out with some extra weekend calls and not one of them would take any. Good job I don't have ultimate control because I'd sack the lot of them and then we would be in a pickle.

Will get round to reading and reviewing when the moon is blue and I have a precious day off. I have about oooh, fifty jobs going if anybody with the right level of compassion wants one.