Time - Over and Annual

So the new job has a couple new wrinkles when compared to my old job.  These are neither good nor bad in and of themselves... they just, Are.  The first is overtime.  I'm going to go ahead and include Holiday Pay in this category.  To put it bluntly, there is none.  At the old job there was a few ways to get overtime and almost every single pay period included at least SOME overtime.  I could have had a busy day and not finished my documentation until 10 minutes after my scheduled end time.  That's 10 minutes of overtime that was perfectly acceptable according to the supervisors.  Even on a slow day there could be an urgent or emergent case that comes up just a few minutes before the end of shift.  In general we wouldn't hand that off to the next nurse up, so we would stay and finish it up.  If that means staying an hour after shift, then that means an hours worth of overtime.

Then of course there is the 'nightmare' scenario.  Being mandated.  I was mandated a total of three times in my two years as a state employee.  Twice it was to stay over night, while one time I had to come in early.  Neither of those are any fun at all and I didn't appreciate the overtime for it... but the overtime pay WAS impressive in hindsight.  Eight hours at 1.5x pay.

Then there's Holiday Pay.  The way this works is that there are 13 paid holidays in the year.  Each paid holiday is 8 hours of pay.  If you are working the holiday (or more specifically, not taking any time off during that pay period) that 8 hours of pay is immediately overtime.  Basically that's 12 hours of free pay.  And those holidays are bunched up at the end of the year.  Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving are both paid holidays.  Christmas Eve and Christmas are both paid holidays.  New Year's Eve and New Year's Day are both paid Holidays.


At the previous facility I wouldn't get any of those days off.  If any of the days happened to fall on my scheduled day off that was fine... I still got 8 hours of overtime as I worked my 40 hours that week.  So I would more than likely get between 1 and 3 of those days 'off'.  But just having the Holiday Pay earned me over 2 grand in 'extra' money.

 Over the year Holiday Pay got me just a touch under $5,000!  I avoided voluntary overtime like a turkey avoids thanksgiving, so all of my overtime was either from staying late a bit or being mandated.  But a rough guess would put my overtime at about $2000 for the year.

At the new job, that's $7000 I won't be getting.  I asked around and between all the nurses they guessed that there may have been 3 mandated overtime shifts for the entire year.  I'm about halfway up the seniority tree so it's doubtful I'll ever get mandated.   And with 4 nurses on my regular shift and NO urgents coming in at the last minute, there will only be the very rare day that someone will have to stay over for 10 minutes or so.  Even then, I'll be one of four nurses on shift, so realistically I'll only get 1 out of four of those times.  So realistically... no overtime.

Holidays are a completely different beast.  Basically the clinic is closed on all paid Holidays.  They are at critical staff the same way they are for the weekend.... in other words only one nurse for the entire shift.  Those holiday shifts go up for volunteers, and there are several nurses all trying to get as much of that sweet sweet holiday overtime that they can.  I could throw my hat in and probably get some of it, but honestly I like having the holidays off.  I still get the Holiday Pay, but it's paying for the day off... in other words it's neither 'extra' pay nor is it ever 'overtime' pay.  It's just a paid day off.  So realistically... no Holiday Pay.  

I don't think I'll miss the money.  I got a pay raise when I changed jobs.  Not because of changing jobs, it just happened to occur at the same time.  That almost covers the money lost.  But another major difference is starting to rear it's head.  Going home early.

I've said before, we have four nurses on a normal day.  Technically there are two days that we only have 3 nurses as the nurse working the weekend takes the Thursday before and the Monday after the weekend off.  Toward the end of the shift there are 3 specific tasks, so we can't dip below 3 nurses until those tasks are finished.  On those days when we only have the three nurses though, about an hour before the end of shift, we can send someone home.  On the other days of the week when we have all 4 nurses, a nurse can be sent home really at any time.

Well wait.. they can't be "Sent Home".  The Supervisor will start asking if people would like to go home early.  The union contract more or less dictates that we will get paid for 40 hours of pay each week.  So if we take up the supervisor and go home early we use up either annual or sick leave.  I'm one of those people that actually use my sick time, so when I go home early I eat in to my annual leave.  And as the nurse on shift with the most seniority, I get that offer first.  It's mine to take if I want it.

I don't imagine it will always be like this, but over this years holiday season we were really slow.  I got to go home early 4 out of the six days I worked on the last pay period (December 21 through January 1).  I used up just under 14 hours of annual leave.  And then today?  I wasn't even in there for 10 minutes before the supervisor asked if I wanted to go home.  I'd like to think that if I was feeling better I would have stayed.  I just came off a 4 day weekend and I really have nothing to do at home.  But I'm still feeling under the weather and there really wasn't much to do there today.  So yes, I just burned another 8 hours (7.75 actually) of annual leave.

Leave is granted by seniority (unions are so predictable).  As a state employee with more than 1 year's seniority I currently earn 4.7 hours of leave per pay period.  In case you are working that out in your head that's a couple hours over three weeks annual leave per year.  Seeing as I didn't use much of my annual leave in 2015 I had about 120 hours built up when I transferred.  I haven't taken a 'day off' since I got there but I've burned through about 20 hours of that time.  I obviously can but won't keep up that burn rate.  If I did it would be all of my annual leave and I wouldn't be able to actually take days off.  No vacations or trips outside of my scheduled days off.  I already have a weeks trip to Mexico planned, and will certainly be taking short trips to Chicago, at least one trip down to Dallas, and at least one trip out to San Francisco.  Even on shorter 'weekend' trips I'll still be taking a day or two off for each of those.

So it's something that will be running in the back of my head.  I'm sure the opportunity will come up often enough... I'll just have to be strong enough to say 'no' when the supervisor asks if I want to leave early!

I know, I know... not exactly a problem.  More of a first world problem.  Like crying when starbucks runs out of their organic naturally sourced soy non dairy cream.  I love having first world problems.  When you can worry about first world problems it means that you don't have any REAL problems to worry about!

YAY!