Today was the culmination of a challenging week
The agency I work for as a driver used to have two women acting as transportation coordinators. For reasons only known to management they made one of them into a floater who would fill in for other coordinators as needed.
The main woman has been on holiday for two weeks; the floater has next week off but also got an appointment for laser eye surgery yesterday with today being arecivery day.
Fair play she made up the schedules for the drivers for Thursday and Friday on Wednesday and I had to check voicemail yesterday in case there were any last minute cancellations or new bookings.
Oh... I didn't mention our manager was off Monday thru Thursday, and he is relatively new to our team.
Around 10:45 I had a call from a coworker asking if I knew who was picking up a client for a physio appointment; I didn't.
About 11:20 I parked the vehicle I had been using (Dodge Sprinter, 8 passengers) since my next cients would be fine in a mini van, and went to buy some coffee cream. As I was paying my phone rang, the manager. Turned out one of our drivers had arranged to take the day off, but the coordinator wasn't aware and had assigned him various clients including one who had a dialysis appointment at 12:00! Could I take her in?
Quickly I paid and went to the office to grab keys for a van. Had a quick chat with the manager and coworker who had called me who had two clients ready to go home. I agreed to pick one of them up; did the dialysis run (got the client there in time) and then went for one of the clients ready to go home (success).
While this was happening i was also thinking about the congregate dining program (we pick up seniors, take the to a restaurant for lunch, and then drive them home). Two drivers were assigned the pickup, one of them and the driver on vacation were assigned the drive home. Sigh. I called the manager and suggested that for the drive home we could handle it with the one driver if he used the Sprinter. Problem solved.
Back to the office hoping to put the schedule together for the drive home of clients in our Adult Day center. Luckily only 10 clients needing a ride (other clients come in with their families) so 3 drivers would be ok. One in the Sprinter with a support worker, and two in mini vans.
Turns out we couldn't get a third driver. We have a pool of 4 full time drivers (one of whom was on vacation) and a few casual drivers with limited availability. This week I've been on an early shift, 8:15 to 4:15 with the other full timers on a 9:00 to 5:00 shift. The ADC clients are meant to leave between 3:45 and 4:00 meaning the early shift driver doesn't participate due to lenght of work day.
I told the manager I'd act as the third driver.
Then off for another client pickup with heavy traffic both going there and heading back to the office.
Got the ADC clients home and back to the office by 4:45. Sign out and am all set to head out when I realize no cell phone! Check everywhere and realize I must have left it in the van. Back to office, grab keys, find phone on dash, rereturn the keys and finally head out.
Why oh why can't we have a list of vacations on the wall in the office so we all know who's away. Some of our drivers are very reluctant to share ANYTHING with the rest of us, including planned vacation time
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