The former identifies me as a member of a class of people that lives beyond the 9 to 5 existence that tends to define comfortable middle class-dom. The latter puts me in a select group of those that work outside the lines of a conventional career.
I work Thursday to Sunday. Two regular days on the ends, well regular in the sense that they're an eight-hour shift. Two long days in the middle, 12 hours each. Friday nights end at 10 p.m. Same for Saturday.
From Friday morning on, the conventional weekend is shot.
The payback for this is an extra day off. My "weekend" is Monday to Wednesday. I've been doing this job for a little over six months now.
I have worked weekends before, early in my career when saying no to crazy shifts was career-limiting. I was living with a Monday to Friday person, and over time the non-compatible schedule I kept got to me. I agitated to get off of it.
Since then, weekend work has been episodic: major events, occasional backfill, a rotation. Something to be endured and sometimes embraced when the event was interesting, but not my life.
Now I'm back into it.
The work itself is not especially interesting. I am an assignment editor for a news department for a radio broadcaster. I tell reporters what to do. I make decisions, in concert with others, about what our organization should cover. I am a bit player in all this. There are others more senior who get to make more decisions. The bulk of mine are confined to the weekend and as such are limited in scope. I don't have anyone to assign. Ours is a Monday-to-Friday operation.
So once Friday afternoon rolls around and the A-Team sashays out for its conventional weekend, I am there to make sure nothing bad happens, or more accurately to make something happen if something bad happens. If the Space Shuttle plunges from the sky or a politician is assassinated or an earthquake strikes, I am the sure, experienced hand that will help lead my colleagues through the first crazy moments and get our news service pointed in the right direction. I am there essentially to react to events.
The rest of the time is really about treading water.
There is some planning, some talking, some editing, some chasing, a bit of thinking and a lot of watching. Watching TVs, computer screens, and out the window when the electronic screens give me a headache.
The difference between weekdays and the weekend is striking. On Thursday and Friday there are people around. The shops nearby are open, all the lights are on, the building's ventilation system is functioning. By about 9 p.m. on Fridays, it's like a neutron bomb went off inside. People evaporate. The phones don't ring. Escalators are shut off until Monday morning. The lights all over the building get turned down and the air inside gets stale. The bathrooms start to smell bad. An mostly-empty office tower doesn't really make a lot of sense. It's designed to be used, not left fallow, so best to shut 'er down.
Sometimes when you work in a place off-hours, it's possible to take a kind of special ownership: the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Not here. You have the run of the place, but you can't actually do much with it. You can't start ordering people to cover this and that, those people work Monday to Friday. It is its own special hell, Marley's Ghost tossing handfuls of money into the wind.
For me, the strangest experience is leaving the office on Fridays and Saturdays. I head out the door and into the teeth of Toronto's entertainment district. Many Saturday nights I go just as Leaf fans are pulling out of the Air Canada Centre, or the theatres are disgorging their patrons. On the side streets, the lines are forming outside the nightclubs. Taxis crawl along trolling for tolls. Me? I have my bag slung over my shoulder and I am going home after work.
Pulling a 12 hour shift pretty much guarantees that you're not going to want to party when it's over. You want to sleep, unwind, breathe fresh air. Watching people enjoying their time off is like wandering through a beer commercial. I've grown out of the night-clubbing thing, but I have really missed the pleasures of a Saturday night out, or an end-of-week pint with colleagues, and sometimes resent my inability to partake.
When I've done shift work before, one of the fringe benefits, such as they were, was the shared misery. There were usually other people working the same hours as you. At the end of the shift you could go off together to grab breakfast or a ridiculously early drink. There is no shared misery in this job, it's all mine. I come in alone and leave alone. That is perhaps the worst part of it. It's given me a new appreciation for those who toil alone at strange hours.
There are lots of people who work weird hours who have satisfying careers. When I look on with a certain envy at the people who work on Hockey Night or the NFL or NCAA football, I have to remind myself that they are working a weekend too. It's just that their job seems a lot cooler than mine. I watch the morning TV people I am in awe of their ability to be so energetic at that time of day, and I'm glad they're there. It's reassuring. I wonder, though, how many of them are single?
The weekend/shift-worker badge is something I wear with a certain grumpy pride, but it isn't one I intend to wear forever. All jobs teach you something, this one has taught me when I want to work.
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