Five or so years ago, I routinely worked 60-70 hour weeks for over a year, which is probably not the best strategy for an extended period of time. For much of that time, I tended to be at the office or working from home for at least part of every day. Though I did take some vacation, I built up a backlog of vacation days that I continue to this day because there is no practical way to use them.
I still work 60 plus hour weeks when something is pressing, but in shorter bursts of time.
The longest time I spent at the office was a very long day that started before 8 a.m. one morning and finished around 6 a.m. the next. I then went home had a short nap and was back at the office around 9 a.m. That was a very long day indeed.
I worked every day for 4 months in a row ( November through February).No days off at all. But I wanted to. I could have taken off as many days as I liked.
I was driving a bicycle rickshaw in Waikiki. The money was alright, but the girls I met from the “mainland” while working made all the hours worth it! (“You really live here?”) I just worked days;my nights were free.
My first year in radio, I worked seven straight months without a day off. I took one day to attend my grandfather’s funeral, then worked another couple of months straight. After that I started working six-day weeks.
As for the longest shift, I can remember a number of 18-hour days (yeah, usually a convention or trade show), probably a few that were longer. The longest sit-at-a-desk-day I can remember was 15 1/2 hours.
Mr. Stuff, before we were married, once went five whole years without an entire day off. He was a dairy farmer, and by entire day off I mean missing both milkings. So in that time, he would occasionally get an afternoon off, say, for a wedding, but never had both milkings off in the same day, and the half days were rare.
He is now a salesman, and works about 60 hours a week. People think this is a lot, and he laughs at them. (Inwardly, if they’re prospects.)
In the mid-nineties, back when commissions at Sears were high enough to make it worthwhile, my best friend and I worked open to close 14 days straight, starting with the day after thanksgiving. We stopped not because the Xmas season was over with, but because we’d sold so many tvs, computers, etc. that nothing more was going to be available before Xmas eve.
When I worked for a local feral cat trap-neuter-release program, I worked for 18 months without a day off. Days started anywhere between 7 and 9 and ended between 7 and 12, with some trapping going on in the wee hours.
I loved the work, but my boss (who was a control freak) and his crazy girlfriend finally drove me to quit. It’s the only job I’ve ever quit without giving notice.
For nearly 3 years I had not a single day off and I averaged 80 hours a week. I had two shifts off out of 14 every week (Thursday night and Friday morning), so I could do something. I even came in on Christmas and other holidays when we were closed to prepare for the next day.
When doing field work, probably the maximum was a bit over 4 weeks at one stretch.* When it takes so much effort to get into a remote area, you want to take as much advantage as you can of your time there.
I’m pretty sure that I worked months on end without a full day off when I was in graduate school, but that’s all just a blur now (thank God :)).
*The longest was during the rainy season in a swamp in Mount Doudou National Park in Gabon that we affectionately called Deep Doudou. Towards the end the team members were competing, “Survivor”-style, to see who would be the one who stayed in camp the longest without going into town. I came in second.
Last year I worked for 5 and a half months straight, ten hour days, no day off, ever. Why and how? I was working on a cruise ship, which was Bahamian flagged - no labour laws. Absolutely terrifying to me, raised in cushy, lefty surrounds. To get a sick day, one had to convince the cranky, disinterested nurse to declare you unfit for duty, which thankfully I never had to do.
It was an interesting experience. I learned more about Mickey that I cared to know, and a lot about high volume activity programs for kids. Met some awesome crewmembers from all over the place, who I fully intend to go and visit, once they come to their senses and stop working on cruise ships.
What’s the longest streak of working days you’ve had to endure, and what was the occasion?
Heh. If you include time thinking about work, trying to solve problems, then the answer might be “I’m still in it.”
But if you’re talking about “consecutive days at the office/workplace”, then I’ve gone stretches of 60+ days straight. I don’t really keep count.
Also, what’s the longest number of consecutive hours you’ve had to work on one shift?
52 hours.
Note a couple of things:
It’s the family business. I’m not a “hired hand”, I’m trying to build equity. In short: don’t blame my boss, I choose this.
My schedule is this:
Go into work around 6:00am. Work until 5:00pm, go home and spend time with wife/daughter. When daughter goes to bed (around 9:00pm), go back into work for 3-4 hours, usually about three days a week.
Go in the weekends when you can. Time it so that nobody else is in the office, so that you can get work done!
How many days in a row, I’m not sure. Probably 3 weeks or so.
Most hours at once, I once worked a shift from noon sunday to 5:00pm monday, so 29 hours. There was another time I worked 42 out of 48 hours. (two jobs).
I think I was trying to post this when the Reader’s server room put on its fireworks display…
Four summers ago, I worked a month straight, then three weeks straight. I was working at both Cala Foods and at Kaiser, saving for a car. Those stretches sucked, but I actually kinda numbed myself to the outside world and was OK, plus I was saving for a car, and once I bought it, I could quit Cala.
I think the longest single day was ten hours, and by the end of it, I wanted to stick my head in the deep-fryer. I don’t think I’m cut out for overtime, at least not in customer service.
I suppose those 12/13 hours days in high school could count, when I was doing theater.
(1) A little over 3 months, working 7 days a week, 14 (or more) hour days. Back in 1998, a Y2K upgrade in a manufacturing plant uncovered a relatively minor bug in a system, but when you deal with things in a manufacturing plant, there’s no such thing as a minor bug. “Minor” bugs make big things go boom.
(2) About 32 hours straight, solving a problem in another manufacturing plant to make sure that nothing went boom.
Keep in mind I normally work nice normal 40-ish hour weeks.
In the oil biz, while running a deck crane; 12hrs/day, 7 days/week, Feb thru June with no days off. I figure it to be about 150 days straight. (We had the wintertime off, though)
Nothing close to any records here. My job allows people to swap days off, so you can work a long stretch of days in order to get a long stretch off. But I’ve never really gotten inot this program; the longest I’ve ever worked was 16 consecutive days. The most consecutive hours I’ve ever worked was 32 (we’re not supposed to work more than 16 consecutive hours by contract, so you have to sneak in longer shifts).
During my first tenure at Boeing, I worked on the Navy PHM program and it was a mess. Commencing the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend I worked straight through till Thanksgiving Day. Most of the weekdays were 10 and 12 hours, we only worked 8 hours on weekends. I then worked the from the Friday after Thanksgiving till a week before Christmas when I caught a nasty case of the flu.
Ah the Navy. Nothing like 6 hours on, 6 hours off watch days and days on end.
In the shipyards my Aircraft Carrier was pulled out of drydrock by 20+ tugboats, held in place in the Delaware river for the better part of a day while the drydock was emptied and some of the blocks were re-arranged and the Carrier was put back into place.
OK, we the Fire Squad were onhand and playing cards waiting for a problem most of the time during the 30 some hours it took, we were without power or heat in the middle of winter in Philadelphia. Damn it got cold after a while. Lunch and dinner were cold cut sandwiches.
Then a few months later before the boilers could be fired up for the first time the entire fire supression systems had to be recertified. I don’t remember much of those few weeks except sleeping on steel deck plates napping here and there and going to the Exchange (the Navy equivelant of a PX) for new underwer and tee shirts.
Once in the Persian Gulf a coupling between a pump and motor atomized itself. Shards of fiberglass everywhere, a catrostrophic failure. Stan, our machinist made a new part from scratch. Took more than one try. I was the only one who knew how to realign the shafts. About 20 hours later working at an awkard angle snaked into a opening a mouse would have thought narrow I heard a voice ask how’s the repair coming? I answered in a true four letter manner that could make your ears blush.
I had no idea that it was the Captain. Bad Goob, Bad.
People wonder why I didn’t reenlist.
Then I worked on a farm working from dark to dark.
Now I see the light and have a normal 40 hour week job. Except for the side under-the-table job nights and Saturdays at a friends’ machine shop. Plus the paintball store I opened a few months ago.
