I resigned today!
I have mixed feelings about it. I'm sad because the good days were really good. We helped a lot of animals, we worked hard, and we got everything on our to-do list done. But those days were so few and far between, and I was asking myself why I was there more and more often.
The list of cons just kept getting longer: mismanagement, toxic coworkers, coming home drained every day. It sucks spending every weekend recouping from the work week and preparing yourself to do it all over again. Being chronically understaffed was adding more stress to the load. I was losing my technician skills because we had no coverage, so I was basically spending all day, every day cleaning and counting/giving out medications. I would always feel tired at the end of the day, and simultaneously feel like I had gotten nothing done because we were so backlogged with patients. So many patients with problems that were non-urgent, but still needed to be addressed, were just sitting on our special cases list for over a month. And management was still acting like we weren't doing enough.
I'm a little nervous because I don't have anything lined up, but I sent out some applications last night, and I've already got interviews lined up, so we'll see. In the meantime, I'm gonna pick some old hobbies back up now that I'm not going to be too exhausted to enjoy them.