Imagine working in a hospital where there are three shifts available, day, mid and night. If you were assigned shifts in such a way that you only had a few hours to sleep before waking up for work the next day, would you accept it, or would you find a workaround?

In this story, one secretary and nurse aide is in this exact situation, and she is exhausted! So, she warns her bosses about what she plans to do, and then does it. Now, she’s wondering if that was a bad idea.

Let’s read the whole story to decide.

AITA for switching to the night shift after my supervisor continued to mess up my schedule time and time again?

For context: I, 23M work on an open heart, thoracic surgery, and vascular surgery Step down unit, as a secretary and nurse aide.

We just got 2 new supervisors after my first 2 supervisors retired, I had worked less than a year when they got promoted.

When I first got the job, They trained me to work the day shift and said that they would also ask me to pick up on Mid shift if needed.

Day shift meaning 7a-3p and 7a-7p, while Midshift would either be 2p-10p or 3p-11p. For night shift it would either be a 7pm-7am shift, 7p-11p, or an 11p-7a.

Her schedule didn’t give her much time to sleep.

In the last two, 8 week schedules that I had, they put me to work mid shift one day and then day shift the very next day. They did that 3 times in the second schedule and twice in the first schedule.

I didn’t really think about it a lot the first time it happened but I remember being SO EXHAUSTED by the time I had to wake up for my day shift I probably only had 4 hours of sleep at max.

I had asked my supervisors if I could get this fixed and they said, we have to make sure that everyone gets Mid shifts and day shifts equally.

After some compromising, I was able to get all but 2 switched in the first schedule and 1 in the second schedule.

She’d rather work the night shift.

I told my supervisors that if they continued to schedule me like that, I would be going to night shift, more because night shift and mid shift have more consistent schedule cause a lot of times they are short staffed.

When the new schedule came out to sign up for shifts I scheduled myself for nights because they kept messing it up.

My boss said that I was being inconsiderate about all of the day shift aides and secretaries because I switched up on them with no notice.

Her bosses aren’t happy.

I reminded them that I said I would do it if they continued to schedule me like they did.

They then said that they would allow it for this schedule and I needed to make up my mind for the next schedule coming out.

I feel a little bad about it cause I didn’t know they would react like this. AITA?

Why do they keep switching the shifts? It seems like there should be a set staff for day shift, another for mid shift and another for night shift.

Let’s see what Reddit has to say about this situation.

This person doesn’t think she did anything wrong.

This is a good suggestion.

She needs to prioritize her wellbeing.

Everyone agrees that she didn’t do anything wrong.

Working when you’re exhausted is unreasonable.

If you enjoyed that story, read this one about a mom who was forced to bring her three kids with her to apply for government benefits, but ended up getting the job of her dreams.