As the title says, and the gif says.
Today was the longest I have ever worked. Ever. And it's longer than any singular shift my dad has worked and he's been working for the past 30+ years.
How many hours did I do that I'm dedicating a post to it? 12.5. Yeah, you read that right. TWELVE AND A HALF HOURS IN ONE SHIFT. Okay, okay, maybe that's not the longest ever, but for me it is. Back when I did 40 hour weeks, I was doing 8 hour shifts a day. Some people I know do 10 hour shifts. My dad sometimes does 12 hours, so I guess in the one instance I outclassed that by only half an hour. Sure, I sat down and did nothing for 30 minutes for a lunch break, but other than that, I was on my feet, preparing bread, making subs, serving customers, doing anything a crew member at a sub shop needs to do, for 12 hours. And I am tired. How tired? Let me show you a selfie I took after my shift ended and I got in my car:
I was exhausted. My mind was shutting down, I couldn't functionally perceive time passing by. I literally looked at the clock at 7:37, made a comment on how time passed, and when I checked again, it was 7:47. I blurred through 10 minutes.
My day started at 7 a.m., when I woke up to get ready for work and have breakfast. Then I started work at 8 a.m. Since the pandemic, I stopped working at 8 and started at 9:30, but today we had to make 240 subs by 10:30, so I got called in early. Then around 9:30, we got our usual catering order of another 60 subs. By 11 a.m., we fulfilled 300 subs. And that was intense.
Originally, I was scheduled to just come in earlier than usual and end at 4 like I have been. That's when the day shift goes home and the evening shift comes in to finish the afternoon and close. Today's shift had 3 people on staff, and so at 2 p.m., I was unexpectedly asked to stay to closing. So instead of an 8 hour shift as I had planned for, I was tasked with another 4.5 hours, totaling to the 12.5 I did today.
Towards the end of my regular shift, I was getting a little tired from the standing and working, but I was going to be fine. The extra hours is when my mind felt tired and my eyes felt the exhaustion coming on. My knees held up find luckily, and it was quite the day. If you think about it, even if I were to be awake for all 24 hours of the day, I spent more than 50% of it at work. Account for sleep and cutting down to actual wakeful hours, and now you're looking at 73.5% of my day was spent at work (17 hours awake, so 12.5 over 17 is .735, or 73.5%).
I just have one more day to get through and then the weekend is mine to relax. My paycheck next week will be nice as it reflects all the extra time I did, and I'm blessed to not need to do 12 hour shifts all the time and to realize how tough people have it if they do need these long shifts. I should be grateful for the experience and grateful for the work.
It's always good to count my blessings at any point in time (especially in this pandemic) rather than to count my shortfalls or my curses or whatever you would call it. To just have perspective.
Anyways, I'm tired and I need to go to bed. I'm done
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