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Longest shift you've ever worked

Helobious

By Helobious
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Huckleberry

Huckleberry 33058

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30 hours. Came in on Wednesday around 8:00, knew I'd have to stay late because I drew the short stick for engineering representation at the first quarterly inventory check using the new software.

The software sucked and I finally left at 2:00 Thursday afternoon after we had to go manual to backcheck the software on every item. When I told my boss I was leaving "early" at 2:00 he asked me if I was coming in on Friday. Yeah, no. I mean the 30 hour shift wasn't actually that bad because it wasn't hard manual labor and I wasn't even 25 years old yet, but be serious.

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Wally Fairway

Wally Fairway 5571

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17 minutes ago, slorch said:

3.5 days without sleep?  Constantly working?

Math slorch, how does it work?
40 hours = 1 day +16 hours, so just over 1.5 days.

I pulled a couple of those in public and one in industry, all of them going from the office to the printers for an offering or reviewing closing documents on a deal.

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Doc Holliday

Doc Holliday 199

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Posted

Party City Manager: Halloween week = 18-20 hour shifts every day 

Blockbuster Video Manager: busiest store in CenTex = 16 hour shifts 

Tech Staffing Company: Supervisor for 50 consultants - had to fire one late notice = 2.5 months w/ 100 hour weeks 

Project Management:  Multiple 30 hour shifts as I was primary for operational incidents and go-lives 

 

 

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Walden Ponderer

Walden Ponderer 12639

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36 hours of troubleshooting remotely for annual software updates, back when everything was on these big-assed tapes that looked like 8 tracks. Over 100 steps, which our clients always fucked up, and the larger clients with multiple stores used to take three days to complete an upgrade.

I don't miss that job one teeny tiny bit.

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baboso

baboso 6056

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27 hours straight as a roustabout on an offshore rig.  Worked my normal 12 hour tour (6 am to 6 pm), workboat came in right at the end of it to be unloaded, then the damn shale shaker got clogged up and we worked the rest of the night on getting it cleared out and running again.  6 am rolled around again before we were done.  After we got the shale shaker fixed up, the toolpusher took mercy on us and told us to disappear for a few hours.  Found a cool shady spot below the helodeck and slept for about 3 hours and then went back to work until 6 pm.  My ass was dragging at the end of that tour.

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Nuge

Nuge 1976

Posted
Posted

Did a lot of 18 hour shifts doing live event production.  Get in early, set up, run/produce the event, tear down, load truck.  Years of that.

The longest was when I produced a video for a bank.  We shot for 12 hours and then I edited for the next 24 to give them a 16 minute video 36 hours later.

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Lhorn

Lhorn 4930

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Posted
8 hours ago, slorch said:

Never mind.

 

I'm a dumbass...

It is known......

 

In residency we regularly did 36 hours straight every 4th day sometimes for a couple of months.  Worst was covering the bone marrow transport unit - 36 hours every 3rd day.  And I didn’t kill anyone. 

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TornACL

TornACL 7722

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One thing I learned with time and age and wisdom. If you're a salaried worker and are routinely asked to stay into the wee hours of the night, your company is either fucking you on pay or your company is completely mismanaged. Either way, GTFO. There's more to life than staying at the office until 3am.

My first job out of college I had a few projects where I wrapped up the presentation/deliverable around 4am after coming into the office at 8am the previous morning. The president of the company would always make a big stupid showy deal out of granting me a day off for my hard work. Don't bother coming in later this morning, get some rest.

Yeah, no fucking shit genius. I'm not going home for a 3 hour nap and turning around to come back here for more.

 

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Guest

Guest

Posted
Posted (edited)

I agree with ACL.  i will still do 'required' stuff like support around peak volume times and will even volunteer for projects.  My examples earlier in the thread were from hurricane situations.  For Rita, I actually slept in my office two nights before the storm, because I knew if I went home(33 miles one way)  I'd never get back to work.  Wife and kids were already out of harm's way, so they weren't a factor.

It can be rewarding living up to the challenge of a natural disaster or crisis.  Be there when your people need you.  be the first to take care of your customer-  they remember for a long ass time.

I ain't doing that shit on the regular.  My boss is more than fair when it comes to 'comp time' too.  Show up when business demands it.  take it light when things slow down.  I am light years better at managing my own schedule than I was as a younger employee.

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FartingMonk

FartingMonk 3608

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That's why I won't ever take a salary position ever again.  If you're gonna make me stay, I'm getting paid.  That's what caused people to get so disgruntled in the military.  We would stay onboard and work from 6 am til 10 PM.  Show back up the next morning at 6 and take care of whatever business we had to and high tail it out of there.  Our command master chief would make a big deal out of people leaving at 10 am and bitch us out saying we weren't team players.  

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Bateshorn

Bateshorn 9928

Posted
Posted (edited)

When I worked on the line, I once did 16 hours straight.  The Prep cook got arrested, so I got called in.  Then one of the lunch guys didn't show, so I worked lunch, did evening prep and worked my normal night shift.  I didn't get out of the kitchen till about midnight.  Then we went out, of course. That was pretty rough.  I worked the prep/lunch shift the next day, too.

On the Hill, I once worked a vote-a-rama for about 20 hours.  Got in at 8, didn't get home till after 4 AM the next day.  But honestly, after about 10 pm, I was mostly napping on my bosses couch waiting for Leadership to wrangle the votes they needed.

Edited by Bateshorn
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blacklab

blacklab 11942

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Posted (edited)

Sea trials on a sub.

Worked from about 2am to 1am. Laid down and went to sleep. Got woken up 15 minutes later because a pump caught on fire. Worked on that till 5am. Was all excited because I was going to get about 2 hours of sleep. 6am get woken up so we can clean the sub. End up working till about 10 that night. Went 3 days and got maybe 4 hours sleep total. Near the end of it I passed the captain in the hallway and he asked me why I haven't shaved. I told him I'd shave when I got 3 strait hours of sleep. 

That probably wasn't the worst though.  4 times in the shipyard we did trials of some sort that lasted 6-8 weeks. Half the nukes worked 6am to 6pm, and the other half worked 6pm to 6am. We'd have to be there to brief 1-2 hours ahead, and debrief and do our normal shit 1-2 hours after shift. 6 strait weeks of working 14-16 hour days 7 days a week is a fucking killer. One month I kept track of my hours and I made $1.68 an hour. 

We had people that literally went insane. One guy called up and said I'm not coming in you can't make me, I have a gun and you're not taking me. The swat team had to go get him. Another guy called his wife and said he stopped to help a couple of guys changing a tire and they kidnapped him. He was pulled over in Illinois a few days later.

The non nukes had nothing to do at this time so they came in at 8am and typically left by lunch time. The XO overheard some of us bitching about the hours and butted into the conversation with a "Yes, but you are justly compensated for all the extra hours with your nuke pay". Nuke pay was $100 a month. We were working about 250 more hours a month then they were. I let out a "Oh my fucking god are you fucking kidding me" and he told me to come to his office. We yelled at each other for about 10 minutes and after I showed him some math finally came around a little bit and admitted he might be wrong.

I fucking hated that fucker. One time we somehow lost our pickup truck that was assigned to the sub. So the XO said no one could leave until it was found. Even though it was 10am, we had been their since 5pm the previous day, and had to be back at 5pm, we had to stick around. We got a milk carton that had a "Have you seen me" with a picture of some missing kid, and cut and pasted a picture of a pickup similar to the one missing from an autotrader and put it in his inbox. He was not amused and was ready to kill someone until the doc told him he better laugh or that type of shit will continue.

 

Edited by blacklab
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Wally Fairway

Wally Fairway 5571

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Posted
3 hours ago, blacklab said:

Sea trials on a sub.

Worked from about 2am to 1am. Laid down and went to sleep. Got woken up 15 minutes later because a pump caught on fire. Worked on that till 5am. Was all excited because I was going to get about 2 hours of sleep. 6am get woken up so we can clean the sub. End up working till about 10 that night. Went 3 days and got maybe 4 hours sleep total. Near the end of it I passed the captain in the hallway and he asked me why I haven't shaved. I told him I'd shave when I got 3 strait hours of sleep. 

That probably wasn't the worst though.  4 times in the shipyard we did trials of some sort that lasted 6-8 weeks. Half the nukes worked 6am to 6pm, and the other half worked 6pm to 6am. We'd have to be there to brief 1-2 hours ahead, and debrief and do our normal shit 1-2 hours after shift. 6 strait weeks of working 14-16 hour days 7 days a week is a fucking killer. One month I kept track of my hours and I made $1.68 an hour. 

We had people that literally went insane. One guy called up and said I'm not coming in you can't make me, I have a gun and you're not taking me. The swat team had to go get him. Another guy called his wife and said he stopped to help a couple of guys changing a tire and they kidnapped him. He was pulled over in Illinois a few days later.

The non nukes had nothing to do at this time so they came in at 8am and typically left by lunch time. The XO overheard some of us bitching about the hours and butted into the conversation with a "Yes, but you are justly compensated for all the extra hours with your nuke pay". Nuke pay was $100 a month. We were working about 250 more hours a month then they were. I let out a "Oh my fucking god are you fucking kidding me" and he told me to come to his office. We yelled at each other for about 10 minutes and after I showed him some math finally came around a little bit and admitted he might be wrong.

I fucking hated that fucker. One time we somehow lost our pickup truck that was assigned to the sub. So the XO said no one could leave until it was found. Even though it was 10am, we had been their since 5pm the previous day, and had to be back at 5pm, we had to stick around. We got a milk carton that had a "Have you seen me" with a picture of some missing kid, and cut and pasted a picture of a pickup similar to the one missing from an autotrader and put it in his inbox. He was not amused and was ready to kill someone until the doc told him he better laugh or that type of shit will continue.

 

tl:dr - tree fiddy

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FartingMonk

FartingMonk 3608

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4 hours ago, blacklab said:

Sea trials on a sub.

Worked from about 2am to 1am. Laid down and went to sleep. Got woken up 15 minutes later because a pump caught on fire. Worked on that till 5am. Was all excited because I was going to get about 2 hours of sleep. 6am get woken up so we can clean the sub. End up working till about 10 that night. Went 3 days and got maybe 4 hours sleep total. Near the end of it I passed the captain in the hallway and he asked me why I haven't shaved. I told him I'd shave when I got 3 strait hours of sleep. 

That probably wasn't the worst though.  4 times in the shipyard we did trials of some sort that lasted 6-8 weeks. Half the nukes worked 6am to 6pm, and the other half worked 6pm to 6am. We'd have to be there to brief 1-2 hours ahead, and debrief and do our normal shit 1-2 hours after shift. 6 strait weeks of working 14-16 hour days 7 days a week is a fucking killer. One month I kept track of my hours and I made $1.68 an hour. 

We had people that literally went insane. One guy called up and said I'm not coming in you can't make me, I have a gun and you're not taking me. The swat team had to go get him. Another guy called his wife and said he stopped to help a couple of guys changing a tire and they kidnapped him. He was pulled over in Illinois a few days later.

The non nukes had nothing to do at this time so they came in at 8am and typically left by lunch time. The XO overheard some of us bitching about the hours and butted into the conversation with a "Yes, but you are justly compensated for all the extra hours with your nuke pay". Nuke pay was $100 a month. We were working about 250 more hours a month then they were. I let out a "Oh my fucking god are you fucking kidding me" and he told me to come to his office. We yelled at each other for about 10 minutes and after I showed him some math finally came around a little bit and admitted he might be wrong.

I fucking hated that fucker. One time we somehow lost our pickup truck that was assigned to the sub. So the XO said no one could leave until it was found. Even though it was 10am, we had been their since 5pm the previous day, and had to be back at 5pm, we had to stick around. We got a milk carton that had a "Have you seen me" with a picture of some missing kid, and cut and pasted a picture of a pickup similar to the one missing from an autotrader and put it in his inbox. He was not amused and was ready to kill someone until the doc told him he better laugh or that type of shit will continue.

 

yep, i remember those days well.  we called it being in zombie mode.  your body was there, but everyone was basically walking zombies.  i chuckled at the non nuke thing because of the old term.  If it's a nuke problem it's a nuke problem.  It's a cone problem then it's a boat problem.

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Born a Longhorn

Born a Longhorn 13

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Posted
1 hour ago, slorch said:

32 hours in hell?

 

/thread.

Well... we landed at around the 20-hour point, then debriefed for a few hours, then since I was the junior officer in the squadron and it was 9/11, I had to run around base setting up a roll call for that evening that ran several more hours. No idea how long I slept after that.

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Onboard 2.0

Onboard 2.0 9083

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12 minutes ago, Born a Longhorn said:

Well... we landed at around the 20-hour point, then debriefed for a few hours, then since I was the junior officer in the squadron and it was 9/11, I had to run around base setting up a roll call for that evening that ran several more hours. No idea how long I slept after that.

weeeeeeeeell only 20 hours ? That changes eeeeeeeeeverything

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Underdog

Underdog 28763

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Posted
7 hours ago, Mr. Drummond said:

i can't even count how many 32-36 hour runs i've done.     50 easy.  8am to 5pm the next day.   When I first started my company that would be a fairly common.   Work a normal day, then at night run the machines till the workers came back and then did my normal day again.

 

 

Well,  you did get 2 extra mouths to feed, clothe and shelter unexpectedly. 

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MaybeACoordinator

MaybeACoordinator 8349

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I had an on-off job for an acquaintance many years ago delivering AC compressors to big facilties -- hospitals, factories, military bases, etc. I lived in Nashville at the time, and that fucker would have me drive down to Atlanta, pick up a compressor, turn around, and take it to motherfucking Chicago, all in one day. Speed limits were at most 65 then, so 74 was the only safe speed to go, especially since I was sometimes dangerously overloaded. 

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RDCanecutter

RDCanecutter 26462

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Posted

In the Arrrrmy we did some insane stuff, and it was just training, not war. Once went so long without sleep that I hallucinated that I was following a giant purple bunny rabbit through the woods, instead of another guy in my platoon. Later that night I caught a few minutes quick sleep in a ditch while M-60s were blazing away a few feet away. The noise was comforting.

But those weren't "shifts".

Civilian job shift, once worked 24+ hours at a sewage plant during a flood. It had flood walls and all the pumps were shut down or else the river would have turned it into a sewage pool. They took my teenage ass in on a boat and left me with water and food. All I had to do was be there, glorified security guard. Very quiet and post-apocalyptic,  my only human company were some river folk who'd parked their trailer on high ground nearby. I wouldn't call it working, but I got paid.

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Onboard 2.0

Onboard 2.0 9083

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2 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

In the Arrrrmy we did some insane stuff, and it was just training, not war. Once went so long without sleep that I hallucinated that I was following a giant purple bunny rabbit through the woods, instead of another guy in my platoon. Later that night I caught a few minutes quick sleep in a ditch while M-60s were blazing away a few feet away. The noise was comforting.

 

Yeaaaaaaah, I think what you had there was what we call an acid trip.

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MaybeACoordinator

MaybeACoordinator 8349

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Posted
3 hours ago, RDCanecutter said:

In the Arrrrmy we did some insane stuff, and it was just training, not war. Once went so long without sleep that I hallucinated that I was following a giant purple bunny rabbit through the woods, instead of another guy in my platoon. Later that night I caught a few minutes quick sleep in a ditch while M-60s were blazing away a few feet away. The noise was comforting.

But those weren't "shifts".

Civilian job shift, once worked 24+ hours at a sewage plant during a flood. It had flood walls and all the pumps were shut down or else the river would have turned it into a sewage pool. They took my teenage ass in on a boat and left me with water and food. All I had to do was be there, glorified security guard. Very quiet and post-apocalyptic,  my only human company were some river folk who'd parked their trailer on high ground nearby. I wouldn't call it working, but I got paid.

I heard some podcast about how the Navy is the worst branch for enforcing that everyone in it gets as little sleep as possible, which is really comforting to know. It's not like they are out there crashing giant warships into tankers or anything, or that one bad 31-hour-on-the-job snap decision could cause an international incident or even launch an actual war. 

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