Back in the days of gone by I did a placement out one of the rural stations. There you did 12hrs on station and 12hrs at home on call for 4 days but I did do 7 once as to help out a colleague. That’ll be 168 hours then but these were the days of old and really didn’t go out much during the day never mind at night. Couldn’t really call it one shift because of that.

Now as those days are gone and we get hammered every shift they abandoned those shifts. We now do 12 hour shifts but because we are so busy we get late jobs. Longest was New Years Day last year, I went in for overtime and ended up doing a 16 hour shift. Still it paid for my PS4 as it was double time. 😀

Done the 8am fri to 6pm Monday thing. Usually working 8-6 Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday but being on call the 3 nights. Average 1-2 calls a night taking between 1-6 hours depending on what you got.

Now we split it do fri 8am till sat 5pm and then back on sun 8 pm till mon 6pm and somebody else does sat day, night and sun till 8pm.

Much better.

Are you actually safe doing your job at the end of these marathon shifts?

Used to do crazy long 72 hours shifts in the ski shop during the School holiday changeover weekends.

Started Friday afternoon when the rentals came back, and spent the whole weekend in the workshop servicing skis and driving all over the area delivering and fitting them.

Got the odd nap in a chair for half an hour, but do dn’t see a bed till Monday evening.

Proper work, one of this watching TV and sleeping while “on call” 😉

I’ve been in work for 72 hours or thereabouts. Obviously not working constantly but I got paid for it all. Data centre power failed on boxing day. About 30-40 of us worked, ate and slept in the data centre/operations centre. God, it was awful. We would work till we collapsed, sleep a couple of hours, carry on.

I got home almost comatose and the phone rang. First the first and last time in my professional life I flipped and threw the phone into the back garden.

What’s your longest shift?

WTF is all this sleeping/on call nonsense.

The question is about the longest time you’ve spent at work and working (I’ll give you loo breaks and time to grab a sandwich), not how long you went from starting a period of work and having sleep/being on call!

That said, I’ll let Samuri off – that much time spent with any tech nerds would be hellish.

The question is about the longest time you’ve spent at work and working (I’ll give you loo breaks and time to grab a sandwich),

What the hell is this loo breaks and bloody hell a chance to eat? 😯

Touché Drac….

sadexpunk – how’s it going G? Used to work with you in Walsall 😉

Mark

Running a grain drying during a very wet summer I think I did a week of 18hr days.

After that when the boss cocked up the job planning and expected us to do a 14hr day in Hastings, drive back to Burton and be on Teeside at 9am the next morning. Spat the dummy and didn’t go to Teeside.
More recently ended up doing red eye flights home so I was hitting 24-30hrs for some of them in total.

I ran a continuous 36 hour event for work, then was bundled into a car to the airport as it ended so I could fly to a conference in the US, so roughly 50 hours awake. I couldn’t sleep on the plane, got to my hotel room and collapsed for 16 hours face down with my clothes on. My head looked kind of like a potato when I woke up.

Are you actually safe doing your job at the end of these marathon shifts?

No, that’s why they stopped. Like others, as a junior doctor I worked Friday morning to Monday evening. In one job three of us shared the rota so when one was away you worked Monday morning through to Tuesday evening, Wednesday morning through to Thursday evening and then Friday morning through to Monday evening. Worst week for me was 133 hours or 127 if you excluded the time I was asleep.

I can tell you that I was so tired on one occasion that I saw the patient and did the right things ( I went back later and checked ) but when I came to write the notes I couldn’t remember how to do joined up handwriting and after some very slow thought did the entry in block capitals.

My main aim was to fail safe and allow the seniors who had had sleep to sort the problems in the morning.

Nowadays, my longest period on call is 40 hours and that is availability with a couple of 10 hour days in amongst it. However, already had one night with no sleep this year which makes me unusually grumpy by late the following afternoon.