I work at a hospital, and as a 24 hour operation, we have night staff for just about everything. I can’t speak about the medical staff, as I haven’t spent any appreciable time as a patient, but our night facilities and houskeeping staff are just total fucking wastes of air.
I plan meetings and special events – a lot of them start in the early morning, and depend on the night staff to make arrangements. I give them scale drawings with every damn piece of furniture, and I can’t count how many times the space looks nothing at all like the picture. The night supervisors lie about what happens, or didn’t happen, and why. The night staff is supposed to do things like empty trash and clean carpets during the night because of lower traffic, and much of that gets relegated to the weekend days.
I don’t work in a patient care area, and I hope the patients get better attention than my area. The day crew is terrific, even though their workload is far worse because the night shift fucks off.
I used to think people were stuck on the night shift because they were inexperienced, and the senior people got the choice shifts. And maybe so, but for a lot of fuckups who don’t want to have anyone looking over their shoulders, the night shift IS the choice shift.
Since I come to work a 630 AM, I often end up schlepping furniture around. I am not supposed to, as only the union people are supposed to do that kind of physical labor, but the night crew is gone and I have 30 MDs showing up to do case reviews, and if they’re unhappy the shit falls on ME.
Oh well, let’s just say it’s been a bad couple weeks, except that I did get 4 days off over the holiday to make things considerably more tolerable.
Well, seeing as how hubby and I have both worked the night shift – by request (and he is in fact doing so right now – well, not RIGHT NOW, you know what I mean – and running his ass off all night with barely a break), and we are not fuckups, I would be inclined to suggest that you may not have the whole picture.
It’s been our experience that day-shift people think the night shift should be a piece of cake because “nothing’s going on.” I beg to differ; shit happens then too. And I don’t usually notice day-shift people rushing for a spot on graveyard, if it’s so easy.
Your particular crew may indeed be fuckups. But I hope this thread won’t degenerate into an “only lazy morons work the night shift” generalization-fest.
(Sorry, hubby had a REALLY bad night at work the other night, so this is a fresh wound.)
I hope my company doesn’t have that situation - I’m part of our night nursing staff. Seems that’s when the real nursing happens, because we don’t have doctors over our shoulders telling us what to do. When interesting things happen - and oh, they happen on night shift, believe me - we are making decisions and taking action and doing all the same work that the day shift does, plus all the routine paperwork that gets schlepped onto us because “it’s so much less busy.”
And at least in my unit, all the scary (in their practice) staff members are on days. That’s where they belong. Under watchful eyes.
Oh, and I don’t have anything bad to say about all the non-patient care staff on nights - it’s the departments that aren’t staffed outside of business hours that give me headaches.
At my company, I actually think the night shift gets more done than the day shift most of the time. There is no night shift person who does my job, but there are people who bring us work on both shifts, and I am often amazed by how well the night shift is able to fill our shelves with work when I come in in the morning.
I do think, however, that the night shift sometimes rushes through things a bit too quickly–I then have to go to the day shift people to get mistakes fixed, and they don’t like that one bit.
The people I know who work night shift like it–they either like the extra money, the fact that they work four 10-hour days instead of five 8-hour days, or that they don’t have to wake up early in the morning. I would guess there are many who like it for all three reasons.
At the hospital where Papa Tiger works, a lot of the night guys are the best workers; it’s some of the day people who can’t be trusted to do anything. He counts on the night and weekend people to get a lot of the work done that the day people will spend so much energy avoiding doing that it’s ridiculous; actually doing their jobs would be easier.
I suspect every workplace has a particular group who are fuckups. It varies, probably, by shift and department, but it certainly does seem to be true, from my experience, anyway.
We don’t have a night shift where I work now. Back about 15 years ago, I worked for a defense contractor, and we did have a night shift. One day they noticed a bunch of circuit boards came out looking discolored and funny. They ended up figuring out that the night shift had cooked a pizza in the oven used to dry the coating on the circuit boards and forgot to set the temperature back to the right value when they were done. Between the off temperatures and the contamination from the pizza, they ruined a whole batch of circuit boards, back at a time when 12 layer military grade circuit boards had a price tag of over $10k each.
We also had a guy who used to crawl behind the equipment test bays and sleep for most of his shift. He was caught when he slept past the end of his shift and clocked out late.
Good lord man, can’t you keep you trap shut about that! The cot behind the equipment racks is the best place to sleep. It’s warm and the fans drown out the chatter from all the people working. You are going to screw it up from the rest of us that haven’t been caught yet.
My experience at The World’s Second-Best Selling Commercial Jet Aircraft Company is that the day shift spends their time bogged down in paperwork and the second and graveyard shifts assemble the airplane.
My night shift worker isn’t bad, but the other guys working night shift are–especially since the company owner works both shifts, sometimes I’ll find out that something’s come down from “on high” and the only person in my department who knows about it is the junior night shift guy because he happened to be there when the owner thought of it.
When I was the graveyard cook in a 24-hour restaurant, the dayshift dishwasher thought that he was the “head” dishwasher by virtue of working the day shift. One morning at 6:00, as I was getting off and he was coming on, he decided to inform me, “They put all the good workers on dayshift, and all the bad workers on graveyard shift.”
I replied, “No, Robert, they put the people they trust to get their work done without the boss watching on graveyard shift.”
The manager, who listened to this exchange, nodded in agreement with my statement. “Yup.”
ETA: This dishwasher was fired a couple months later when an assistant manager decided to follow him when he left the building for his lunch break and found him drinking beer at a nearby tavern.
The place I work is a Mediocracy (Rule by the Petty and Mediocre). So we have useless people on day shifts (where they cannot threaten management) and talented, well qualified trouble makers on nights.
