I Actually Like My Job...

Not too many people can say that nowadays. The place where I work, and the people for whom I work are great. I do have times when I get frustrated with some of the stupid stuff that goes on, like people destroying the portable radios or vehicles and management not holding people accountable for their actions, or people not adhering to plainly spelled out directives concerning the radios. Likewise, sometimes I get pretty overwhelmed by the amount of responsibility that has been heaped upon me. In my previous jobs I was a worker bee..."go here, do this." It didn't take a whole lot of thought or planning, I just had to make sure I accounted for my time and did the job right within a certain amount of time. Here is a whole different story. Here I have to get quotes from different vendors, write parts requisitions, plan installations of vehicular and fixed equipment, strip equipment out of the old vehicles, install equipment in the new vehicles, maintain a fleet of 20 current vehicles which they want to expand that to 30, maintain approximately 230 portable units on which I do PM's (preventative maintenance) twice daily, recondition batteries constantly, I take care of the programming of all the portable and mobile radios and the fixed base stations, repair the broken portables, send mobile radios out for depot level repair when needed, maintain the fixed equipment (3 repeaters, 3 base stations and 8 satellite receivers), maintain the dispatch consoles, maintain a backup dispatch office, attend numerous meetings for everything from daily update meetings to radio system improvements to new buildings that will house more fixed radio equipment, oversee any contractor work regarding fixed equipment in any building, issuing radio equipment to the officers and maintaining an accurate database, attend vendor demonstrations of new products (which can be quite cool sometimes), keep up-to-date on and inform upper management of the new technologies coming out and write up my own budget every year. Not to mention I'm in the middle of reorganizing the room where we store all the portables and reorganizing my own shop as well, which now looks like a disaster area. Did I mention I'm on-call 24/7 since I'm the only one who does my job? Oh yeah, and I'm part of a "ride-out" team when natural disasters like hurricanes strike.

The pay isn't bad...it's a damn sight better than the last company I worked for. I'm still not making as much as I did working for the City of Houston, but the raises here are more consistent and the benefits here are better than either of the last two places. I'll delve into that more in a later post. I'm under alot less stress than I was at my other job, believe it or not. Thankfully my management sees that I'm constantly busting my ass to get things done, so they don't pressure me too much. My predecessor was there for 28 years before she retired, and many of the people there have been there for anywhere from 5 to 15 years. We only have one problem child, and that one should be retiring in the next couple of years, so we don't pay too much attention to their bullshit. Everybody else has little gripes and complaints, it's just par for the course.

They recently did some schedule changes. It actually worked out better for everyone in the long run. Now at least we don't have to work a bunch of people on the holidays (the change before this one, which no one liked). We used to be off for every state- and federal-sanctioned holiday, but someone decided we had to be there even on the holidays so they changed the schedule to where we had to work 3 holidays out of the whole year. Terrible, right? The way I see it, such is life when you work in public safety. Others didn't see it that way. You can't please everybody all the time, though.

All-in-all I can say I'm pretty satisfied with where I work. I'm glad I took the job here, and I'm glad to be back in Houston again.