Pay period 24 was just published yesterday. This is the pay period that we lose Stephanie and Emma. Due to losing both of them, I had to move people around for coverage. From here on out, there will be times that we won’t be able to rotate back and forth from day to swing to day. Please just double check in WMT to see what you are scheduled for. There might also be a time where you are scheduled to work a shift by yourself. If you are working a shift by yourself, please time your breaks during a slow period so you can forward the phones to the OM. If you absolutely need to call in sick for whatever reason, please follow that up with a call to either myself or Vaden so we can try and figure something out. And since almost all of the shifts now only have 2 people on them, if you have to call in sick, please also notify the other person on your shift so they have a heads up that they will be by themselves. Honestly at this point, we are just trying to get through the rest of this year. If we are forced back to BWS, someone will get forced off their bid line to balance the schedule. I’ve been really fighting against this especially coming in to the holidays.
We are in the process of working out for some trainees to come back to resume training. For us the first one back will be Dan. Once the training department is able to accept students, Jeff Drasin from SEA will start. The plan is for him to be in the training department for approximately 3 weeks before heading to the A area to get his minimums on 2 d-sides. He will start in TMU as soon as that is finished. It will be crazy for us to have 3 students training all at once when we are at our lowest staffing numbers. But we need to train our way out of our staffing issues. We are all going to have to do our part and help with training.
As Derek said in his email, we should start bidding the week of October 18th. This bid for us will be quite interesting. We will be bidding a 9 line bid, almost identical to the one we bid this year, with the exception of the Saturday 10 will now be an 8. After discussing things with Derek and Randy, we have determined that, while not ideal, Dan and Jeff will need to bid with the rest of us. The reason behind that is the MOUs that were required to be rolled over from this year, state that if trainees bid trainee lines, they can bid up to 2 leave slots per day. That could potentially leave us with 3 people bidding the same day later in the year. We thought that covering their lines for the first part of the year was the lesser of two evils.
We will be bidding via BidATC again this year. It seemed to go very smoothly for us last time. All your info from last year will remain the same. If your email address or phone number changed, please update it so you will receive the notification when it is your turn to bid. If you have any issues updating it, please let me know and I can try. The site is still in “test mode” so I’m not sure how much you can see but I will be uploading the bid soon so you can take a look. If for some reason its not showing up, let me know.
I know there are a lot of changes going on right now and some of them are not ideal. I’m really hoping that this is the worst of it and it has to get better from here. Along with the current trainees, we also have Eric Garner (the other Eric) joining us in late February and I just found out about Jared Baxter (from Huntsville) joining us in the middle of March. There is a possibility by next summer we might actually have some staffing.
As always, I really appreciate everyone’s patience through all of this. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.