Sometimes, I wish I had the energy of a five year old.
I get home from work, completely exhausted, and am instantly worn out by just watching The Munchkin twirl around the living room, irritating her daddy and making a mess. This is repeated every Monday through Thursday night. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, I'm usually so tired by the time that The Boy and Munchkin are gone for the night that I can barely muster the energy to change for bed, let alone get any work done around the house.
Monday and Tuesday nights are usually a battle of wills between The Boy and myself to determine who will be getting dinner for the three of us. I maintain that he should be responsible since I work on Mondays and Tuesdays and he doesn't.
I think the job is really what is killing me right now. Even though my stress levels have decreased exponentially since the retirement of the supervisor from hell, I still find myself exhausted every day. I can wake up full of energy and become immensely tired by the just the thought of going to work. You can only imaging what happens once I get there and attempt to make it through the day. By the time I make my way to the end of the work week, I typically need at least one full day of nothing in order to recover enough energy to do anything semi-productive for the rest of the weekend.
I'm hoping that some of the exhaustion and lethargy is weight-related and will vanish once I've lost some weight, but, meanwhile, I'm stuck in this endless cycle of utter exhaustion. I drag myself out of sleep every morning to the blaring of my alarm (on which I've probably pressed the "snooze" button more than a few times); I drag myself to work after the briefest morning routine I can manage. I have my work preparation down to a science. I can wake up at 0600 and leave my house by 0625 (0630 if I have to wash my hair or shave my legs). I have all but given up on wearing makeup, and I throw on the nearest articles of clothing, with little to no thought to whether or not they match. Once at work, I trudge from my desk to the nearest available coffee. By the time I trudge back to my desk, my computer is ready for me to actually sign on. I have an hour (give or take) until my first appointment of the morning shows up. Sometimes, I get lucky and I don't have a morning appointment until 0900 or 1000. Mostly, though, my life is a circus of appointments with my clients (yes, I have clients who make appointments simply because they got a letter in the mail with my name on it and the clients want to meet me in person) and my futile attempts to meet the completely unreasonable expectations set forth by the upper management in our department (none of whom can even navigate the computer system, let alone mange a caseload).
A year and a half ago, my caseload was hovering around 300-350, and we hadn't separated the homeless cases from the rest of the Food Stamps cases. Now, each Food Stamps worker carries a caseload of between 500-550, and the homeless/elderly cases are in a completely separate unit (those cases number in the 3,000s). So now, instead of 2,400-2,800 cases divided amongst 10 workers, we have almost 7,000 cases divided amongst 9. The increase we have seen in our workloads alone is unreal.
One thing I am currently thankful for is the fact that we now have a supervisor who understands the fact that there is no physically possible way to accomplish everything we're supposed to do within the time frames allotted. His motto is "do your best." It's nice to know that I'm not going to get written up for doing my best and still falling short.
I'm not a math person, and have never attempted to figure how much time is actually required to do my job (I simply know that 80 hours every two weeks is not sufficient), but my supervisor has, apparently. He told a coworker that we would need a minimum of 200 hours a month in order to meet the minimum requirements. My perfectionist self would probably need closer to 300 hours a month to make my caseload look the way it did a little over a year ago.
I don't think anyone will ever be caught up again. We work in quicksand. The more we struggle to dig ourselves out of the pit, the deeper we sink (and it doesn't help that upper management is dumping more on top of us by the truckload).
I really hope I find a way out soon. There has been a rash of retirements lately (Gee, I wonder why?), and I was talking about retirement time frames with some of my coworkers. I realized that, if I stayed with this department, I would have 30 years of service by the time I'm 50 years old. The only problem is that I don't know if I will live to see my 50th birthday if I continue working for this county, let alone this department.
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