Oh, everyone knows we're short-staffed. The problem is we're currently bleeding people faster than we can hire them. We've hired one new guy (he started last week), but we've lost two people in the last month: one to illness and subsequent retirement, and the other was Fitness!Girl, who has gone on to become a regular member of the RCMP.

We have one woman who has *just* gone on a 52-week maternity leave (yes, the RCMP has awesome benefits), but she's been on sick-leave since before I was hired, making a giant gap in the schedule.

There's another guy on permanent sick leave until he retires (sometime in the fall, if memory serves), and two people who are part-time only due to health concerns.

We've also lost one guy to promotion: he's still around, but has new administrative duties to fill, and no longer works the same schedules as the rest of us.

So that's five full-time positions we need to fill, and two part-time positions (we don't hire part-time anyway, so it would be at least one other full-time position), and the hiring process takes a minimum of nine months. In that time, we're probably going to lose at least one person to "sick" leave (don't get me started on her), and there's at least one guy on probation.

In essence, we have a serious problem on our hands.