There was another department in our facility that was also a 24/7 operation but the were on a different schedule. They did 12 hour shifts with A/B shifts working MON-WED and C/D shifts working THU-SAT and then the shifts would trade off every other SUN. When that department started that schedule, they were the only 24/7 operation in the building while most of the other areas were officially on a three shift MON-FRI schedule. They were paying so much overtime though with most machines running at least 6 days a week thatthey just took almost the entire plant to 24/7.
People who have worked shifts other than the typical 9-5, M-F shift. What was it and what did you do
Back in West Texas, I worked mostly graveyard shift in a convenience store. Got robbed three times too, but only once on the graveyard shift.
Working for the newspapers in Thailand was great. I did not have to show up until 3 or 4pm. Finished by 11pm, sometimes by 9pm, and the bars were just gearing up at that time. Could stay out late and sleep late.
I recently had a job where I was teaching from 12:30 - 2:10 then 2:30 - 4:10, with no office hours.
12 Hr shift here.
Officially 6-6, but we typically make relief at 5:30.
It is 4 days, (M-Th) then off 7 come back or 4 nights ( F - M ) then off 3 days, then work 3 days ( F-Su) off Mo WOrk 3 nights ( Tu - Th) then off Fr Sat, Sun, and then repeat… forever,
What we do is Operate and Maintain a 550 MegaWatt Power Plant
10am to 6.30pm, with a half hour lunch at 1pm. The boss liked to work late and come in late, so this worked out better for him. I was happy to miss the peak rush hour, it effectively meant a very quick trip home each evening with no stress. I’d recommend it.
One summer in college I worked at a plastics molding plant, Midnight to 8 AM. You could also voluntarily work 8 PM to 8 AM, which I did pretty often. (I believe the longest stretch I did without a day off was more than 30 days–by choice, because I wanted the money. Doing that now would kill me dead.) But I’ve never had a literally 9 to 5 job. 8 to 4 is the normal thing.
My first job outside of university was a data entry job. 7 PM to 3 AM (with mandatory overtime to 5 AM). It was brutal. Fortunately, I didn’t have to do it for very long before getting my first job in IT.
For about 30 years, typical work week was Mon-Fri, 6am to 3pm. I worked in purchasing, and was on the phone a lot to the east coast. They wake up 3 hours before the west coast, so the shift time made sense to me. My coworkers didn’t like me leaving at 3, but whatever.
The other bonus was I avoided traffic congestion driving both directions, because I was far earlier than the “rush hour”.
I have been working 5 am to 2:30 pm for about 20 years now. The good part is the hour of overtime I get each day. The bad is going to bed at 7:30. I work a ton of weekend overtime too. The only nice part about that is after 112 hours of overtime in a quarter, all OT is double time. I started a new job about a month ago and it should mean less overtime. But here I sit in the big airplane company factory on a Sunday morning earning the big bucks.
I used to work in a small transmission suite broadcasting Sony Entertainment Television Asia to the UK. This is a popular Indian TV channel which is originally transmitted from Singapore to the Indian market (I guess the Indians didn’t have the expertise or cheap enough facilities to do it themselves). From the UK a very large dish could just see the satellite near the horizon so we took the feed. Each transmission controller would work 12.5 hour shifts so we’d do three of four consecutive days and three of four consecutive nights with a gap in between.
My seat was in front of a bank of about 20 screens.
Our facility would record the incoming feed in one hour chunks onto a hard drive ready for re-transmission four (or five?) hours later. My job would be to edit out the local adverts and also anything too dodgy to be allowed on British TV and put the time code details into a playoff system. Basically a computer that played out bits of video from our servers in the sequence we’d plan it in. Think of a big spreadsheet that scrolls up the screen. The UK commercials would be slotted in and we’d just have to make sure the programmes started on time. Because in he UK there are regulations about how many minutes adverts you can broadcast in a clock hour, our breaks were much shorter than the Indian breaks so we’d invariably have to add a music video, promos for the channel or some sort of filler at the end of programmes.
I found it very easy. I’d be puzzled when my boss would compliment me on the lack of errors! But since everything got recorded - including keystrokes - there old be no hiding place if I did make a mistake. I reckon each hour’s broadcast would take about 20 mins to prepare so there was a lot of sitting around. We had a normal TV that could be tuned to British TV so we would generally have that on and would get to watch normal TV.
The most fun bits were when we’d broadcast live cricket matches. That was a break from the norm, and I got to watch cricket! We could hear the director’s talkback which was always interesting and all we had to do largely was take into the ad breaks and alter the break patterns a bit.
The cricket would be done as a pair but the rest of the time we would be on our own. Obviously in the daytime there’d be people milling about but at night it really was lonely. I would bring a few crosswords and a TV guide. Other TCs had been known to have a snooze but that was a bit too cheeky for me and I’m sure they got told off. We couldn’t take a lunch break (normally illegal unless you work in certain industries doing certain jobs which mine was one of) but we’d get a budget for lunch and a runner would fetch us food (the post-production company I actually had my contract with was in Soho just behind Carnaby Street). For night shifts we could present a receipt from a supermarket. This basically took care of most of my food shopping bills.
It was all a bit too easy. I got paid quite well for my age (I was just out of university) and I like bed the days off in between the shifts. Once a month we’d do a stint of 4 night shifts and then get a whole week off. I LOVED that arrangement.
The only word in Hindi I ever learned, after 4 years, was Priyuja… “in association with…”
I only worked in an office for a couple of years after the Army. Between the Army and being a police officer I haven’t worked normal hours for years.
Army: 0600 PT. Work ends when it ends. I would not recommend working an army schedule.
My department has been on a 4 days on 4 days off schedule since before I was hired. 10.75 hours a day for 4 days, steady shifts no rotating. You really can’t beat it. When I was younger I preferred the shift that starts at 3:30 PM but now I like the early shift even though it means waking up way too early. The only issue is that you work the holidays your schedule falls on.
Back in my Air Force days, we were required to have someone on duty 24 hours/day, and also support training, TDY, special projects - all the regular day to day stuff.
The basic schedule we settled on was a month (sometimes 2, depending on how the rotations worked) on day shift, and a month on 12’s.
For 12s, we tried a coupla different times, but most people liked 10-10. You would work 2 weeks of 1000 to 2000, 3 on and 3 off, the switch to 2000 to 1000 for 2 weeks, again 3 on and 3 off (or maybe the other way around) along with a bit of filler as needed. The after a month of shifts, you do a month of days.
I liked it. 3 day weekends every week on shift, nobody stuck working nights for very long, enough time on shift work to settle in on a schedule (a painful schedule if you had a coupla kids and needed to sleep in the day), but the painful parts didn’t last that long, and everybody shared. Some would try to shift sleeping schedules while work 10P to 10A on their days off, but they didn’t try too many times. It was easier to embrace it and accept you were going to live like a vampire for 2 weeks. The 10-10 also gave a bit of overlap between the shift standers and day workers, so that we didn’t forget each other, and developed any ‘us vs them’. Plus, we were free to swap, as long as things were covered - so we did.
Dating was a bit of a problem for the single people (especially if you were, say, dating an ER nurse who worked different shifts - it lasted about 3 months). I got to know the night sky - the Internet didn’t exist, and you couldn’t go drinkin’ every night. I often did stay until closing, then get a (mostly) full nights sleep, and work the next day, but that could get expensive for a poor E-3.
Because we all expected to change shifts on a somewhat regular basis, it solved the Xmas/New Year scheduling problem - single people covered Christmas +/-, married people covered New Year +/-.
I worked in chemical plants for over 30 years as an operator. The standard shift there was a rotating, 7 day shift. For example, we would start 11-7 shift, or nights on a Wednesday night. We worked 7 of them then was off on Wednesday and Thursday. Went back to work on Friday and worked evening shift or 3-11 for 7 more days. Finally worked day shift or 7-3 starting on Saturday and worked until the next Friday. We were then off on long weekend from Saturday until we started Wednesday night on nights again.
The plants all ran 24-7 and usually 365 days a year. At times if someone was out sick, on vacation, or there was a vacancy for whatever reason, they would call the off person to come in. If he couldn’t, or wouldn’t the remaining operators were expected to work 12’s. There were times I worked as many as 90 12 hour days in a row.
I wouldn’t recommend the rotating shift work to anyone. I was lucky, I am a person that can sleep almost any time. Sleeping during the day wasn’t too hard for me, my problem was always coming off of the night shift and trying to switch my hours around. I had two choices, either stay up all day and go to bed that night or try to take a short nap and then sleep that night. Neither one was good. I felt like a zombie either way.
Call centers. Hardly anyone works 8-5 M-F. Best shift I had was a 4/10, 0500-1530 Sa,Su,M,T. No muckety mucks around on the weekends, early in and early out so no traffic either direction and three day weekends all on days when nothing’s crowded. Awesome. Worst shift was 1100-2030 with split days off. That sucked so hard I almost quit before the next shift bid came up.
I worked a swing shift as a materials handler/truck driver from 1500-2330 with standard weekends off, that wasn’t so bad but I did have to rearrange my sleep schedule quite a bit.
School teaching is usually more like 7:30-3:00, and that’s what I do the most of. But when I was teaching college classes and labs, they were mostly in the evenings, with grading being done whenever I wanted to do it. And a couple of times, I had an astronomy lab which ran from 10 PM to midnight, which suited me just fine, because given my druthers I’m an evening person.
My daughter has this schedule at the Army hospital in San Antonio. Is this typical of hospitals?
I had a summer job during University with a similar type schedule, except we alternated weeks of day shifts and weeks of night shift, and then had 6 days off. The shifts were 7-7, am or pm, and the change to night shift added 12 hours to the gaps between weeks, so with the 6 days off, we were on a three-week rotation. There were three full crews doing this job, so basically we just rotated the three weeks, days, nights, off.
For any hours outside the “core hours” of 9-5, we got extra pay, so we got at least a few hours of that every shift, and all 12 hours on the night shifts.
For a summer job, this was great, because the 6 days off gaps, just completely by accident, occurred just when I wanted extra time off to do summer vacation stuff.
The day shifts damn near killed me, but the night shifts were dead easy. I could have done that kind of night shift work for years if I’d had to.
I’ve done swing shift, midnight shift, overnight shift, you name it. Mostly in working with the developmentally disabled. The midnight shift is easy: make sure all of the paperwork is done, the sit there and watch TV until the morning shift arrives.
Worked at a little Water Bed factory 12 am to 4 am. The owner ran the machine 24 hours a day which meant no time for maintenance. Fortunately for us, this meant the machine would often break down mid shift and we could go to sleep.
Datacenter tech for a mediumish sized datacenter. I work 2pm-10pm which is awesome in that I miss rush hours, the office empties out at like 5 or 6 so I’m left alone, the bars are still open when I get off, and even if I go nuts and close down the bar, I still have 10ish hours to sleep it off before work the next day.