The Nuclear Option

 A realization came when I hit a breaking point with late shift. We had gone on vacation this summer, and again I flipped my schedule: getting up at 9 am and going to bed at 1am so I could spend more time with the family. When I got back, I slogged through getting my schedule back to work mode: waking up at noon and going to bed at 4 am. Only four hours difference; shouldn’t be that hard, right? Yeah, it’s been over a month and I’m still not sleeping through the night. I get up at 9am, then fight to get back to bed for an hour almost every night. I can’t seem to get to sleep earlier than 5am, and trying to make up lost sleep after noon doesn’t work. 

Most days I’m tired and irritable, despite my best efforts to be positive. Yes, I’ve done all of the self care stuff; completely dark and soundproof bedroom (we spent $1k on soundproofing when I went to late shift this time), fan on to block out any residual noise, meditate before and after waking up, no screens for 3 hours before bed, get a daily workout in at least 5 hours prior to bed, don’t eat late, avoid alcohol, and even use melatonin and various herbal sleep supplements. Believe me, in the nearly 14 years I’ve been a cop, I’ve been on late shift for more than half that. I know all of the tricks and they are barely getting me just under 7 hours of interrupted sleep a night. 

This is the fourth time I’ve flipped my schedule this year, twice due to early work details, and twice due to trying to be present for my family. It’s not working. After a few weeks of being miserable this most recent time, I knew I had to get back to dayshift. That said, due to the political and bureaucratic intricacies of my department, I know I need to wait another year before trying to maneuver to some dayshift spot. While this late shift stuff is miserable, I’ve put up with it for years, and I know I can gut it out another year. So I started planning it out. 

I came up with an idea to start slowly playing the transfer game, and ultimately be ready to threaten to quit unless I’m given a dayshift position. There are a few slots that I figured I’d be able to get, but they’re highly desirable and therefore difficult to obtain. On the other hand, I’ve made a pretty good reputation for myself in multiple divisions within my department, and I think I’d be able to at least get something. Threatening to quit became the nuclear option, but my personality does not allow me to come up with a contingency and not plan it out to the nth degree, so I started thinking through what quitting would be like if they called my bluff. 

First I ran the numbers, which was easy because I probably do this a couple times a week. Short answer; we have enough for me to retire on our current projected expenses, but not enough to live some upper middle class life of luxury/Fat FIRE. But we could keep on keeping on without me working with little impact to our day to day expenses. Then I started thinking about what I would do if I quit. I’ve never been that happy with having both our kids in full time day care. Our oldest will start kindergarten by the time I quit, so ratcheting down his outsourced care is no longer an option. But I could at least reduce our daughter’s daycare down to 3 days a week, so we’d have her more than half the time. That would still give me 3 days a week to decompress and figure stuff out. Maybe I’d end up taking her out even more, who knows. I could also spend time with our oldest during all of his days off and breaks. Essentially I’d be a part time stay at home day, which actually really excites me. 

I took 3 months off when each of our kids were born, and loved it. Hated going back to work. Before the kids, I was on medical leave for a couple months after being shot; I spent most of my time teaching myself all the math I ignored during high school, reading, and writing papers for grad school; it was amazing! Again, I hated going back. 

I’ve heard coworkers who have been off for even a few weeks say they couldn’t wait to return. That ain’t me. I really like the idea of no longer being tethered to my job. When I’m not doing housework (I already do most of the cooking and a fair amount of cleaning), I could mountain bike more, get back into the volunteering I was doing before I went to late shift, and do more of this writing. Eventually I’m betting I’ll get the bug to self actualize more. At that point I can start some research and experiments about what to do next. 

So yeah, as I thought through what it would be like to quit, it seemed way more appealing than staying on the job and trying to hustle my way into a dayshift gig. While still on the initial plan to negotiate for a dayshift gig, I began looking through what dayshift jobs I could get and what that would be like. I’ve held a few, the longest being for 18 months, and hated all of them. The other ones out there didn’t seem much better. They fell into three categories:

1. Boring as all hell, but regular schedule with no on call. Something like investigating property crimes, adjudicating HR complaints, or Internal Affairs. The best of these seemed like a way to bide time before death, the worst seemed like serious soul sucking endeavors.

2. Possibly fun investigative work, but lots of on call resulting in plenty of late nights and working weekends. Yeah, I’ve done this too. Chasing gun runners, murder suspects, and hard core drug dealers. You’re working on the criminal’s schedule, and they haven’t heard about work life balance or time management. While this was fun before I had kids, and is meaningful work, I’ve been there done that. The work will get done if I’m not there by the current 28 year old version of myself that doesn’t have outside responsibilities. I’d like to see my kids more than a few hours a week, and I have no desire to be one of the guys who works these jobs for decades and has the three divorces to prove it.

3. The street on dayshift. Work 5am to 2pm, with every third weekend off. The street is a decent blend of interesting stuff, but you rarely work over and never get called out. But this would mean I’d be getting up at 4 am and have to work 2 out of every 3 weekends. Frankly, this is the easiest of the three to get, and probably the best balance between fun and a regular schedule. But that schedule still sucks a big dick. 

After thinking through what staying on dayshift would be – either mind numbing, home wrecking, or ungodly early hours while working weekends-and thinking through what quitting might be like, my plan changed. I no longer want to try to negotiate for some dayshift gig with quitting as my nuclear option. Now I’d like to go straight for nuke.

I’m not 100% against continuing to workthere. There’s maybe two goldilock spots in my department that are fun and have normal schedules with minimal crazy. They’re both filled, and I doubt they’ll double slot them because we’re already hurting for people enough as it is and the desired spots are viewed as somewhat superfluous. Right now I plan to just quit, and if they ask me on the way out if there’s anything they can offer, I’ll throw those spots out there with no expectations that they’ll let me have one of them. This does two things:

1. Because of the above, I have no desire to work any of the dayshift options except for those two primo ones. And my desire for those two is just barely over the line. Like if they offered me one of those gigs, I’d be at like 52.3% staying, 47.7% just bouncing.
2. Because of my 2.3% desire for said spots, and because of their high desirability, I know enough about negotiation to know I shouldn’t ask for such a spot unless they actually ask me. I’m totally cool with them not asking me and just quitting regardless. 

So there it is. I started off with a somewhat reasonable plan to negotiate for a better shift, with the idea of having the nuclear option(quitting) in my back pocket for leverage. After thinking through the whole thing, it turned out the nuclear option sounded way better! If you’d asked me before I went down this rabbit hole, I would have thought that I’d be 90% for staying as long as I got any sort of dayshift, and resigned to quitting if they couldn’t accommodate. Once the realization hit that leaving now is much more desirable, I’m now in a more extreme and opposite mindset. I’m about 98% sure I’ll quit, with the little part still hanging on for the extremely improbable chance they hook me up with some super sweet gig. I’m really looking forward to getting out of here, and starting the next phase of my life.