I certainly wish I had sommthing to say, but I'm still recovering from the oddball-early shifts on Sunday and Monday. Sleepwalked though Tuesday, really, and hope to do better today.
Broad Ripple is a wonderful place to live and having been born in Indianapolis, grown up mostly on Indiana and lived in this city for the past thirty-four years, I want to stay. My job is pretty good these days, way more tolerable than what many people do for a living. But swing shifts, even just one week in three, are not doing me any good at all.
I feel your pain. We're about to go into Christmas season around here, and that means, at best, a few weeks of odd shifts. Hopefully, we won't be rotating our hours like we did a couple of years ago.
ReplyDeleteIn my early days I spent ten years working in the newspaper business as a tech support weenie. I dearly loved the job and the people I worked with but had one major gripe that eventually turned into a deal breaker.
ReplyDeleteSince most tech staffs are generally understaffed, news folks notoriously so, we had not quite enough techs to go around so had to suffer the dreaded 'call-in' at night, in addition to working our normal shifts. In times of trouble, the night crew would invariably call the tech who gave the quickest and best fixes. This happened to be me.
I could count on at least three or more four-hour call-ins a week. We were salaried, but were given 'comp time' for extra hours worked. Three guesses how often this 'comp time' was ever available for use. Under-staffing, you know...
No amount of begging, whining, threats or other measures to modify the policy or get more help would budge the powers-that-be, so I reluctantly moved on to more restful pastures.
Split shifts, rotating shifts, and call-ins suck!
Comp time sucks even more.
I worked a job for a while at a glass plant (continuous, 24/7/365) operation. At that time, we had 3 fixed shifts, Midnights, Days, Afternoons, and MAD, which was a fill-in swing shift, Midnights, Afternoons, Days. Unfortunately, it would about drive you MAD. The deal was, you only worked 5 days/week; IIRC, there was a 6th day one week out of 4. You also never worked more than 4 days in a row on a given shift, and twice during the rotation, you had to double-back: work an Afternoon shift, go home, and return on Day shift. Those of us who had a long commute (mine was at least 45 minutes one-way) didn't get a lot of sleep.
ReplyDeleteDepending on your point of view, it seemed either like you were ALWAYS at work, or NEVER working. Days off, for all shifts, fell on weekdays, and everyone got a 4-day weekend every 4th w/e.
I later got a maintenence supervisor postion; they worked a 10 and 4 shift, so you still worked only 5 days/week, albeit 10 in a row, but had a long w/e every other w/e. Midnights was my favorite shift.
US Navy nuclear power training in Idaho had a similar rotation schedule we students hated: 7 days of night shift (8 PM - 8 AM), 2 days off, 7 days of mid shift (12 noon - Midnight), 1 day off (not really), 7 days of day shift (8 AM - 8 PM), then 5 days off.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing that saved us was the Navy provided bus service for the 60 mile trip from Idaho Falls to the middle of the Idaho National Engineering Lab where the prototypes for the Nautilus and Enteprise nuclear plants were built.
Yes, I trained to operate a submarine nuclear power plant in the middle of the Idaho high desert...