What is the maximum number of hours you have worked in one week?

How so? 14 or 15 hours a day isn’t that crazy in short bursts. I only did that for a month or so, granted.

I had two jobs for about three years. I usually worked nine hours a day M-F and two to three hours Saturday and Sunday at my main job and 20 hours per week at my part-time job. If I’d gotten paid overtime in my main job, I wouldn’t have needed the pt one.

The most hours I’ve worked in one week with only one job was 84. I was working for a pharmaceutical company and while we were seeking FDA approval for a manufacturing process, we all had to be there for the entire 28 hours the process took. We did 28 hours on, ten hours off, and then another 28 hours, ten off, etc three times a week for a few weeks. We did get three hours off twice during each 28 hour period for meals and naps but we couldn’t leave the building.

Why, you never had to work hard?

Back in the 90’s I was a technician (outside contractor) for aluminum can plants and was called in to do some maintenance on a piece of equipment (a Metal Box MB160 Spin Flanger) that had been throwing cans for an unknown reason (i.e. its scrap rate went from an acceptable rate to something like 5%). What followed was a nightmarish 110+hour week trying to find what was wrong with the machine and fix it.

In a can plant each line puts out between 1200 and 2400 cans per minute and a typical plant will have 2-4 lines. To work on the machines, you have to shut down the entire line. This plays havoc with the financial viability of the plant and gets a lot of people very upset. There were a team of 4 of us working 24/7 on this machine trying to get it to run right; we would take it apart, replace bearings, check tolerances, replace tooling, etc all to no avail. We finally determined that the scrap was caused by a Belvac 595 necker upstream of the flanger that was putting invisible flaws in the cans that would then be scrapped by the flanger…

It was a week from hell and I quit my job and went back to school shortly after this experience. Screw being a technician, I wanted to be an engineer… I also stopped working in manufacturing environments, the pressure (especially in low margin commodities like 2-piece aluminum cans) is way too high for me.

It’ s been a looong time, but when I was in high school and college, I frequently worked 60+ hours a week at retail stores during Christmas season.

Once when I worked at a nursing home, I worked 3 double shifts, a day off, and three more double shifts. It was due to a combination of a blizzard in Seattle trapping people in place and the flu running through the staff.

I worked a 140 hour week once.

I was working for a New York City production company that specialized in fashion shows. It was a well-paying salaried gig and most of the time it was reasonably easy - erratic hours but not crazy ones.
But that wasn’t what they were paying for. Twice a year, spring and fall, there was Fashion Week.
Fashion Week was different back in the '80’s. Today it is an organized consolidated venture held mostly at a single location. Back then, every design house rented their own studio or ballroom, and scheduled their own show. 90% of them hired my employer to built the scenery, set up a makeshift backstage with dressing rooms, provide the sound and lighting, run the show and take it down once it was over.

The weekend before it started, we all came into the warehouse/shop facility with a packed suitcase and we basically lived there for the next week and half…we took a 3 hour or so break once a day to grab some sleep on an air mattress, showered at the in-house facility constructed for that purpose, ordered food in and ate while working.

I remember the 140 hour week specifically because a new accountant that did not know our drill tried calling me out on it (while we did not get real overtime per se - it was a salaried job - we did receive an hourly bonus for ever hour worked in excess of 50 a week.)

Then it would be over and I had a cushy job for the next six months. Rinse and repeat.

At different times I’ve had multiple jobs. Currently I own a retail business. A few times when the economy was still good I might have gotten close to 90 the week before Christmas, but never 124 or anything close. For the last 10 years a 50 hour week is what I expect to do, Being here 60 happens, but my shoulder is not to the grindstone for all 60.

I’m curious about that profession, is it an actuary? Just a guess.

For this poll, I wouldn’t want to count or include those who get to sleep while ‘on duty’ like firemen or paramedics or military.

I’ve never worked 140+ hrs in a week. My longest week in the civilian world was 112hrs, averaging 16hr days without much variance. Just this week I did an all-nighter and was up for 42hrs straight. I was pretty high functioning, too.

As Gus said upthread, military is often 24 / 7 and my longest weeks while in were 136hrs, averaging 18hr days. Sure I was ‘on duty’ 24 / 7 but I’m only counting the hours I was awake and really working.

The longest single stretch I was awake and functioning for was 48hrs when I drove across the USA on I-10, from Tampa FL to Santa Barbara CA. I made it to near Phoenix before tiring out. That was 31yrs ago when the nat’l speed limit was 55MPH. I’ve always said the longest day of my life was crossing Texas on I-10 at 55MPH. I’ve also done a few ‘Iron Butt’ motorcycle rides, riding 1,000 miles in 24hrs. http://www.ironbutt.com

I’ve always had good stamina. Never worked a 140+ hour week, though. For this poll I put 112hrs.

I said 95, but this was over 6ish weeks and it varied from 80 to possibly over 100 so I don’t remember an exact number. I was working in P&C claims during one of the really bad hurricane seasons. Our call center was running 24/7 and we had unlimited overtime at double and 1/2 time and meals brought in 3-4 times a day. I worked some 24 hour days, 18 hour and I don’t recall what all else. I cut back after I had a hallucination while driving.

I voted 90, but that’s a combination of school (~50 hrs) and a job I had at the time (~40 hrs). I was certainly mentally drained by the end; I can’t imagine doing anything intellectual for much longer than that.

Might I suggest that the OP thinks about statistical grouping in the future? This poll is extremely meaningless at 1 hour granularity.

To elaborate, I was a desk clerk at a family-owned beachfront motel in winter, while the family was on vacation. We had a handful of guests over the week. I’d set up and take down the breakfast, manage anyone checking in or out, book reservations by phone, supervise the housekeeping staff, close out the nightly books and deal with guest issues and street traffic.

It was managed by live-in owners who had a small apartment behind the front desk, so I had a comfortable place to stay and sleep. Closing out the books after midnight and then prepping breakfast at five was a pain, but otherwise it was laid back and I could spend most of my time reading and hanging out. The pay was minimum wage, but when I’d do overnights I would get it 24/7, so it felt pretty lucrative. I’d do overnighters now and then, but I think the longest I did was a week or maybe 10 days.

It’s hard to say exactly, because I had a bedroll under my desk and slept here and there as possible, running down to the gym to shower as needed. I guesstimated 123 hours based upon 5 hours sleep per day followed by a 24 hour straight finish. If you count not leaving the office as work despite sleeping there, then it was the full 168.

These kinds of hours are not at all unusual in my business during war time, and 90 hour weeks are normal during proposal preparations. I try to do ten or fewer proposals per year now, and technology allows me to do most of the overtime from home.

Three days straight when we were implementing a system I worked on, plus some long days working on the systems I was going to work on next. I was out of town at the client site, and we just napped occasionally in one of the offices. Scored big, big points with my boss, and his gratitude was very much worth having at bonus time.

It’s getting harder to do now that I am getting old. But it is kind of fun to remember those times at 4 am on the phone with the operators and the systems people and the QA folks, and the feeling you get when the head of the user team says that all Level 1 and 2 issues are resolved and he will sign off on the implementation.

One word of advise - do not go out for a drink to celebrate afterwards, unless someone in your party speaks gibberish.

Regards,
Shodan

It depends on if we’re counting mutiple jobs.

If it’s ALL work done on a Mon-Sun week, then I think hell week would be it for me.

70 at my hellish manager job as we opened a new location (and I kept managing the previous one also), another 16 at the call center before I quit, another 20 on the show we were working, 4 for the dance hall set-up, and somewhere around 4 for tutoring.

So 114? I clearly recall thinking that people who worked that sort of time regularly were utterly nuts.

In the summer of 2002, I worked 7 days at a restaurant and minimum “full-time” at a retail sales job. So I chose 86 hours.

For around 10 years my Dad worked double-shifts and he probably hit 96 (8x7 mornings, 7x6 nights) hours for the bulk of the summer, at least.

I did oil industry field work for quite a while. Standard is 12 hours x 21 or 28-day hitch, so 84 hours a week officially. Longest continuous was five days with no sleep, during a well site crisis in Guatemala; longest without relief was 7 weeks on, one week off, 6 more on, same location. I’d prefer not to do that again.

I’m now a salaryman with a nominal 40-hour week. Generally ends up 50 or 55 when it’s all said and done, however.

72+ hours a week many times during my time in the Navy (12-hour shifts, seven days a week). I think around 55 hours is the most I’ve ever worked in one week in a civilian job (retail, in December).

At the age of 19 I worked in a factory and there was a week where I had to do double shifts for six days straight, so 96 hours. But since then, no more than 70 (and that was when my boss was running for public office.)

Yes