Shift Work Dulls Brain Performance 131
davidshenba writes: Scientists warn that working in unusual shifts can prematurely age the brain and dull intellectual ability. Three thousand people in France were given tests of memory, speed of thought and wider cognitive ability. People with more than 10 years of shift work history had the same results as someone six and a half years older. The brain naturally dulls as we age, but the researchers said working antisocial shifts accelerated the process.
Work? FRANCE??? Hahahahaa! (Score:3, Funny)
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And what "work" do Americans do exactly, in an entire nation of bureaucrats?
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We blow shit up. And we're damned good at it too.
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The general population doesn't even know how to fight. The general population thinks "our troops" are "over there" doing some kind of "stuff" to "protect our freedoms!"
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If by general population you mean people living in the suburbs, then yes, the general population doesn't know how to fight. Most rural areas and inner cities are filled with people that not only can fight, but enjoy it. I would take my 13 yo nephew in a fight with most suburban men. Its also sad that when I see some jackass placing ill conceived stereotypes that apply to so few people that they aren't really even legitimate stereotypes. Nearly everyone I know in my circle of colleagues and family is either
Re:Work? FRANCE??? Hahahahaa! (Score:4, Interesting)
Well... guns anyway. Balls? I'm less convinced.
The history of US warfare is filled with one-sided confilicts, late entries and early pullouts. The modern American talks big but lacks the will to see things through (see the current situation in Iraq... ISIS taunts the US as a recruitment strategy because they know you're not willing to take the kind of casualties necessary to go back in and squash them).
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We didn't go into Iraq to free them. We didn't go into Iraq to rebuild them. We into Iraq to crush their military force and kill Sadam Hussein. Our mission there ended when that happened and everything after was just our politicians trying to lessen their asshole appearance to the world. And we really couldn't care less about ISIS because its not a problem that directly impacts the USA. When we are asked to, or if they actually work themselves up enough to launch a serious attack against us, we'll happily g
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Burawhat? Im sorry I don't know, but do you want fries with that or not?
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Huh, huh, huh, thank you, drive through.
I mean, thru
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Methodology? (Score:2, Interesting)
When did they test these candidates? If you're testing everyone at 8 AM that's going to show a bias for the people just woke up and had their coffee compared to the night shift workers who are getting ready for bed.
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You tell me I have to come in at 8 in the morning, and I'll only get five hours of sleep a night. You tell me to come in at noon, and suddenly I'm getting a full nights sleep and able to stay awake and do my job without issue.
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Anyone in manufacturing knows more stupid shit happens on 3rd shift than any other. I guess this helps explain why.
It doesn't tell us what to do about it, unfortunately, other than avoid 2nd and 3rd shifts if you can.
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And then watching your district commander who is a Lieutenant try to twist and swerve to explain crime in the area is priceless.
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I always imagined some of that was fewer people watching at night, so the gloves are off.
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Any time someone here asks a question like that, I can usually read the article and prove you stupid. I'm not wasting time doing that. Instead, you tell me what you used to question the methodology.
Was it the summary? did you read the summary and immediately type the first thing that came to mind? Because I bet you did.
Re:Methodology? (Score:4, Informative)
I read the abstract; the actual article is paywalled, which is why I asked the question.
But thanks for assuming I was criticizing the study when I said nothing of the sort and simply had a question about its methods.
I wonder how long until we realize... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well no, but the compensation should certainly be higher.
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Mornings are rough for me. I'm adequate in the mornings, but I'm better in the afternoons.
Re:I wonder how long until we realize... (Score:4, Funny)
So your solution is to force everyone to work at the same time.
Yes, everyone should have to work 24 hours a day. Food and rest are for sissies.
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Until who realizes? (Score:2)
We've got groups fighting the idea that maybe airborne polution is affecting our environment ... most likely because it affects their corporate profits.
If you say that shift work is hazardous to worker's health, no matter what you do (easiest might be to consider it hazardous, and therefore suitable for hazard pay and/or require some monitoring of the employees), it's going to affect corporate profits and therefore, people are going to fight against it.
I'm guessing that the group likely to study this furthe
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Most people that work 3rd shift in the united states get a shift premium as it is. Depending on the company there's usually an hourly bonus of a few dollars after a certain time of day. Most places I used to work at when I did factory work, it was around 6pm to 8pm to around 6am and you got up to an extra $3 an hour which was no small chunk of change in the 90s. If they didn't offer that, no one wanted the job because it really was awful. It has nothing to do with the time of day or the light... or anything
Re:Until who realizes? (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember in the 90s I was on "swing shift" (3-11pm-ish) and we got an extra 17 cents. Lots of people preferred it because they had mornings free during business hours. "Graveyard" shift (11pm-7am) got an extra 91 cents, and "nobody" wanted to do it. Oh, they had people willing; people who were told they were being moved to that shift, and who wanted to keep the job hoping that after a couple years they could switch back. But they had too many new people, production was so much lower they shut it back down.
I'll bet for many manufacturing jobs they could do fine now without more than a few cents extra, because that sector hasn't recovered and isn't projected to.
As far as ordering parts, these days you should be able to do that online and you can have them there by the start of the next shift if your supplier has rush service and starts early. Most parts suppliers start their first shift an hour or two before the companies they service, so that isn't unusual. Day shift can't get parts until the middle of the next day, unless you're at the start of the special delivery route, because they're not going to deliver in between shifts.
As far as appointments and things, you've got it backwards. Day shift has the hardest time, because they have to take time off work to get anything done, and that has a cost for the worker. Workers who constantly ask for time off to run errands are not valued team players. Night shift, if you keep a normal sleep pattern, but just at a different time, then you can set your appointments for after work (evening for you, morning for everybody else) and then sleep afterwards. No problem. Even if you use a lopsided pattern (sleeping immediately after getting off work, which makes for a sucky worker the last few hours of their shift) you still wake up during business hours. Most of the people with this sort of "problem" that I saw were going to the bar at opening (7am) drinking until 9, then sleeping until 6pm, and complaining there was no time they "could get anything done." On a 3 shift schedule it is normally an 8 hr shift, so you have 16 off hours, and 8 of those are business hours. Compare to day shift, who has 16 off hours, none of which are business hours. And if you have a schedule like 10hrs 4 days on, 3 off, then you have at least one whole business day off every week to schedule stuff.
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For all we know, this might've been a factor in the nuclear cheating scandal
That was a promotion system design problem. They were all getting excellent scores but the promotion system was basically linked to perfection. No one is perfect, but when you're strongly motivated you'll find some way to cope. The outcome was inevitable.
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What kind of stupid comment is that? What does it mean to "realize that shift work is a public health issue", what is the purpose of this so called 'realization'?
Are you saying that people shouldn't be allowed to work hours different than whatever you think they should work?
Are you saying that there are no jobs that must be done in hours different than what you think the work hours should be?
Are you saying that people should be paid something different than what they are paid already for different shift wor
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public health is socialism.
That's like saying mass media is feudalism. Or that the flu is capitalism. You're thinking of public healthcare, not public health.
Having established that -- public health is inherently not individual (that's what makes it public) and therefore it literally cannot be an individual responsibility. Calling it an individual responsibility is tantamount to calling for irresponsibility.
That doesn't necessarily mean that government has to do it -- washing your hands is a public health issue that has some gover
No shit (Score:3)
Anyone who has ever done factory work could tell you that. It's brain-numbing. I used to have co-workers who used to talk to themselves and act like schizophrenics after 20 years of it. Fortunately, it was only a temporary college job for me.
Re:No shit (Score:4, Insightful)
The article, and the actual study [bmj.com] which requires a purchase of at least US$30 to view, do not appear to take the nature of the work into account. Shift work doesn't mean factory work or manual labor. Factory work is going to be exhausting no matter what the shift, right? From what I gather, the study is paying attention to the hours worked and not necessarily the work performed.
I spent about 5 years in a mostly nocturnal habit, doing development and sysadmin work remotely from my apartment. I'd wake up around 2 or 3 in the afternoon, shit/shower/shave, spend a couple of hours getting my food and coffee and watching a bit of TV, sit around working on things until around 2 or 3 AM, and then venture off into gaming or Slashdot or Fark or what have you (this was the late 90s and early 2000s) until I went to bed at 8 or 9 AM. Rinse and repeat. I enjoyed this schedule and in fact there's evidence that I thrived on this schedule. Being awake when nobody else is, there are few distractions, I can focus on what needs to be done while the majority of my fellows and users are asleep. Lack of interruption is a treasure.
Then I moved into the enterprise doing development and DBA stuff. Almost 8 years getting up at 6 AM most days, showing up to work tired half the time, having to suck down several cups of coffee prior to being fully awake at all. The story, always the same. Despite any weariness or necessity for caffeine, I still accomplish my best work by far and away prior to lunch, and then attempt to ride the day out until 5:30 hits. The morning is my productive time, after lunch I mostly exist to put out fires, sit in on meetings of lower importance where I'm barely a stakeholder, and plan out the actual work that I'll be doing tomorrow morning. I dislike the schedule because I know that once I get home and the sky grows dark I'll be picking up my second wind and going straight back into a work frame of mind.
My own personal rhythm thrives at night, this has always been true and remains so despite any schedule change you might throw at me. Even with a normal business hours gig in the enterprise, I've still probably done some of my best work from home (after hours but salaried, whatever I accomplish tonight I don't have to fuck with in the office tomorrow) than I've done in the office. I would be, and have been, way more productive if my work schedule was 8:30 PM to 5:30 AM. Was that physically killing me or dulling my mental performance faster than running 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM? It sure doesn't feel like it.
I wonder if I could parlay my penchant for overnights into some sort of International Ops Lead scenario? I'd love to be awake and cranking around the same time that the offshore teams are doing whatever they do/don't.
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I used to feel this way about myself as well, but then I discovered that I wasn't getting quality sleep or enough of it. Have you tried getting 8 hours sleep?
I think what happens is that night owls tend to not have an alarm, so they can wake up when their body is ready. When the night owls have to wake up early, they still try to stay up past midnight and end up getting startled out of a deep sleep 5 hours later.
A plan to try is to go to bed at least 8 1/2 hours before the time your alarm is set. That gi
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I am similar to the OP in that sunlight makes me want to sleep. I am better at night, but my work is standard 8-17, so I can do stuff at night only on weekends and vacations. The weird thing to me is that I can be sleepy all day, but when the night comes I no longer want to sleep.
However, I have solved the waking up problem, at least for me. I have created a playlist of a few songs (~30min in length) that starts out slow and quiet and finishes with a louder song. I set it to auto play 25 minutes before I ne
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The "turn off" button is 4 meters away from my bed.
You're lucky if that's all it takes for you. I resigned on using alarm clocks after I put three of them in highly elevated positions (inaccessible without at least a chair), and then woke up late, with all three of them under my pillow.
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I did the same schedule when I was in my 20s, for about 5 years, and worked great the first few years, but as I got older it just stopped working and I started turning into a zombie. My opinion, either it takes years to cause the negative effects, or else youths have some natural protection. I certainly did thrive at first being able to work whatever hours I preferred, but eventually I came to prefer more normal hours.
"I used to feel this way" seems to be the norm.
I stopped using alarms years ago, and after
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"A plan to try is to go to bed at least 8 1/2 hours before the time your alarm is set"
'Tis a good plan. Tends not to work for people with a shifted diurnal pattern.
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Yeah, but the number of self diagnosed night owls that suffer from a permanent medical condition is likely very small. More likely, the person's reward centers are adversely conditioned.
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I fully understand as I was a night owl for most of my life. I was able to transition to functioning in the morning by forcing myself to get up early every morning - including weekends. It's really tough for the first few days or weeks, but my body eventually adjusted by feeling tired earlier in the evening.
The biggest thing for me was to really tone down any physical or mental activity a few hours before I wanted to sleep. I used to workout in the afternoons, but I switched that to morning before work.
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It wasn't easy - I unsuccessfully tried for years to make the shift. My biggest problem and the problem that I've observed with most night owls is poor self-discipline when it comes to winding down a few hours before bed.
It's no shock that falling asleep is a problem when a person engages in stimulating activities like gaming or debating on message boards the entire evening.
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Why would it be? The whole idea of a factory is to have enough volume of production that investing in machines becomes profitable. It's not a Wheel of Pain [youtube.com].
Obviously, incompetent management can turn any workplace into a Hell on Earth, but that's a separate issue.
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I'd wake up around 2 or 3 in the afternoon, shit/shower/shave, spend a couple of hours getting my food and coffee and watching a bit of TV, sit around working on things until around 2 or 3 AM, and then venture off into gaming or Slashdot or Fark or what have you (this was the late 90s and early 2000s) until I went to bed at 8 or 9 AM. Rinse and repeat. I enjoyed this schedule and in fact there's evidence that I thrived on this schedule. Being awake when nobody else is, there are few distractions, I can focus on what needs to be done while the majority of my fellows and users are asleep. Lack of interruption is a treasure.
Up until my computer "broke" (Newegging parts for a new one) that was my schedule for close to three years and it also agreed very well with me, no programing strictly gaming.
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Shift work does seem to be mostly dull or repetitive. I would expect a study, even if did not make that sort of distinction, to inevitably study that distinction.
If the study did not make some sort of accommodation for the type of work performed, it definitely studies boring, repetitive work compared with less boring, repetitive work.
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White collar workers may work 12 hour days, but they're at least working 7AM to 7PM.
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To keep the brain sharp, give it rich nutrients, some water, and most importantly, lots of light.
Correlation/Causation (Score:4, Insightful)
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I have seen a lot of sharp people working in factories.
They are smart people, they are just not ambitious.
Getting a College Degree/Certificates/Licences etc... Isn't about intelligence it is about doing the work. Now a lot of this work is not fun or enjoyable. So the people who get these accreditation get it from their own personal ambition, not from actual intelligence.
Sure there is a set of people who have significantly below intelligence who are unable to do work that requires brain power. But people
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The worst offense here is mechanism: the brain is not a muscle, and doesn't get weak and dull through disuse, or strong and sharp through work.
Every study on improving the brain through effort has taken a structure of giving people blunt memory tasks or having them study problem solving skills (i.e. mental math, problem analysis, even home economics). The memory studies show marked improvements; but any study which probes the subjects on thought process discovers they've started chunking or otherwise a
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Maybe people who weren't as mentally sharp had fewer employment options and ended up in jobs with shift work.
You might have noticed that if you weren't up all night.
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I never said that nobody who does shift work is smart, just that people who aren't smart may be more likely do end up doing shift work than people who are.
FRANCE?! (Score:2, Interesting)
France has been "innovating" on work rules based on their pet notions of what is right for a long time.
The "traditional" French baguette is not traditional at all, it was invented less than a century ago because laws about working conditions forbid bakers from baking bread in the wee hours of the morning (swing shift), so they needed to invent a loaf that took less total processing time.
Now, I'm not saying that it wouldn't be nice to live in the French dream world, but (speaking as a scientific atheist) we
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"child mortality rates of greater than 50% before adulthood"
How do you have child mortality after adulthood?
Am I the only one (Score:3)
who read the headline as "Shit Work Dulls Brain Performance"?
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Cavemen only have two shifts; hunt all day, or forage all day.
Lack of sleep, not shift work (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who used to work a graveyard shift, I know my brain felt dulled not because of the shift, but because I got 5 hours of sleep a night. The world does not recognize the need for people who work graveyard to sleep. I swear the garbage trucks came five days a week back then.
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Answering the door naked, shotgun over a shoulder helped make sure things got real quiet real fast.
As for automating shift-work - automation breaks.
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Did you try putting a sign up on the door or anything? When we had the kiddos we just left a "Ssh! Babies sleeping!" sign on the door for about 9 months, and almost everyone respected it.
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Jefferson Airplane has a garbage truck sound mixed into some of their songs. That was before digital keyboards; they used a special looped tape effects system. They would work late recording, and then they got woken up by the garbage truck, so they included it in the music. In fact, the Volunteers album and title song was originally Volunteers of Amerika, a take-off of the name of the garbage company, Volunteers of America. (a non-profit that runs garbage service as a fundraiser)
If you're in a city, there a
Work Dulls Brain Performance (Score:2)
Shift Work - Clarification (Score:2)
"Shift work" covers a wide range of jobs, from repetitive tasks (as in a factory) to technical support (as in a call center). TFA is really more interested in the disruption of the circadian rhythm because of those types of jobs. What would be interesting is if there was some differentiation in that study according to the types of jobs. Would working at a call center result in a different sort of degradation than, say, assembly? The former engages the brain (according to my firstborn, who seems to enjoy
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An accurate study would require having the same people working the same job on different shifts, but you'd probably have to hire the people and pay their salary just to get them to do the study. And it would take years, you'd need a few years on each schedule.
Unless some dictatorship decides to order people to participate, nobody is ever going to do a high quality study of this. Just using people in real jobs, there are too many confounders to have a lot of confidence in the causes. Correlation alone might
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"Way lower production, too..."
That's kind of funny (and expected); I had the opposite experience at the plant. Night shift got things done, and done right! Might have had to do with a much smaller "uh-oh" crowd present in the wee hours.
I agree with you about how doing a meaningful study of this would be difficult. Maybe if the setting were say, in mainland China, which has a more compulsory (read: coercive) culture, then perhaps useful data could be obtained.... hmm....{Flame Proofing ON}
Um... (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe people who couldn't get anything better than "shift work" had duller brains to start with.
Re:Um... (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe people who couldn't get anything better than "shift work" had duller brains to start with.
While this is certainly a possibility, even if you took a quick glance at TFA (I know, I know...), you might find out there seems to be more than that:
Those with more than 10 years of shift work under their belts had the same results as someone six and a half years older. The good news is that when people in the study quit shift work, their brains did recover. Even if it took five years.
Why would dumb people "recover" lost brain function if they never had it in the first place?
And once you read that in TFA, it might actually make you want to click on the link to the study itself [bmj.com], where you can discover the methodology in the abstract without even reading the article:
Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 3232 employed and retired workers (participation rate: 76%) who were 32, 42, 52 and 62â...years old at the time of the first measurement (t1, 1996), and who were seen again 5 (t2) and 10 (t3) years later. 1484 of them had shift work experience at baseline (current or past) and 1635 had not.
"Prospective cohort" -- i.e., they had a control group, which they measured periodically. The shift workers did significantly worse....
(Why is it that everyone at Slashdot seems to automatically assume every study is done by idiots who could not possibly foresee their first possible objection? And why do such posts get modded up? There are lots of crap studies out there, but not every obvious objection was unforeseen by most research teams. Sorry for the exaperation, but if you're not even going to bother to RTFA, stop modding idiots up who also haven't.)
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Wow, did you even try and read "the study itself?" Its pay-walled.
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Personal Experience (Score:5, Insightful)
During those years, I experienced three different shift patterns. Rotating once a week (day, evening, night) was worst - pretty hellish. Rotating once a month was bearable. I once did 4 months straight on nights - to my surprise, that worked OK (physically). At the end, I was back on weekly rotation and couldn't wait to get out.
Shift work wrecks your social life. Your friends never know where you're at, so they don't include you in their plans, and you don't have the energy yourself to organize anything.
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I never had a problem with that when I was on shift work... but in the interest of full disclosure this is a Navy town and pretty much everyone has at least a sailor or yardbird or two in their social circle, so dealing with weird schedules is pretty much a part of daily life.
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Shift work wrecks your social life.
Only if you are on 2nd shift. Third shift I've found works really well. You go home in the morning and get your 8ish of sleep in, and then you have the whole evening off to do typical "after work" stuff with friends and family, just like everyone else. The only real drawback is that this puts work at the end of your waking hours, instead of the beginning, so you aren't quite as fresh there.
So generally if I find shift work is required, I refuse 2nd and volunteer for 3rd.
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And for the love of $diety, admit that not everyone is a morning person.
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I know of one grocery chain that deliberately rotates everyone's shifts, so you have a different shift EVERY DAY -- the object is to try to prevent anyone from making it to the 20 year mark, which triggers a big benefits package. Quit before the 20 years are up, and you lose those benefits.
Disagree (Score:1)
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I do shift work here and there and I certainly don't notice my mind dulling. I work actively to keep sharp and continue to learn. Those who stop wanting to use the noodle God gave them, might very well lose cognitive ability.
That you don't notice it is not evidence (at all) that it isn't happening. Your noddle only knows it is a noodle, it doesn't know what it would be like to not be itself. You'd need to use an external, objective measurement to even have a valid claim one way or the other.
If you believe your thoughts come from an animated noodle, I can see how it might be hard to imagine that the noddle isn't perfectly designed for whatever worldly work you're toiling in. Otherwise, it wouldn't give you comfort.
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They claim that shift work dulls your brain, not that shift work makes it impossible to counteract that dulling with other stimulation. You claim you actively work to keep sharp and continue to learn and that you see a net positive, they claim that one component (shift work) is a negative component. You can't really compare one component with the sum of multiple components. I'm curious how you'd feel if you were doing creative and interesting work at your peak hours in addition to continuing the active work
Who needs a damn brain? (Score:1)
We have Google...
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I can ask google "6 feet in inches" and it tells me, but when I ask "42 noodles in IQ" I get 7 million results, and no conversion.
So your brain doesn't need to be very active anymore, but you still need at least a couple cells to rub together.
What's the mechanisim (Score:3)
This is one in a series of "studies" I've seen saying this. What I don't understand is what the mechanism for causing this effect is supposed to be. It can't be absolute time, because then you'd find people with "normal" hours in certain time zones get this brain damage as well. If its lack of sunlight, then you'd see the same brain damage with people who live very far north, or in areas that don't get much sunlight like the Pacific Northwest and England (we can have fun joking, but its indisputable that lots of the world's smartest people live in these places). If it's changing your sleep patterns that causes the damage, then you'd see the same problem with frequent fliers. The simple solution there is to pick one shift and stick to it, which is decidedly not what I'm seeing suggested.
If it's not sunlight or switching, then there's simply no biological mechanism I can think of that would cause problems simply due to the values of numbers on a piece of machinery that humans invented a few hundred years ago.
I can however think of reasons why lots of people would love to grasp any possible pretense to argue against shift work. One should show much extra scrutiny for any heavily promoted "study" that tells people exactly what they want to hear.
Of Course... (Score:2)
Of course shit works dull brain performance.
Oh, "shift"...
Define "Shift work" (Score:1)
A problem of definitions (Score:2)
The main issue I'm finding here is what do they define as shift work. And dear lord, doesn't anyone else have a problem with the phrasing "antisocial shifts"?
From my perspective, what they actually measured here (or failed to measure) is the effect of having a shift that changes often. I believe that you can work 2nd or 3rd shift and experience relatively few side effects (there was a study about issues with not sleeping when it's dark out but moving on). The real problem is the constant change of slee
Did anyone else read the title as "Shit work?" (Score:2)
Or was it just me...?
I knew it... (Score:2)
I worked shift work, 40 hours swing shift, then 40 hours graveyard, up to days
(repeat). Graveyard you worked more than 40 hours but it spanned to the next week and so no over
time.
I transferred to days every other year just to avoid a back assed work scheduled,
Truman's wife was claimed to of come up with.
5 days in to the Graveyard shift you asked anybody what day it was and they most often gave a blank stare.
Being inside a room with no view of the outside was a world of florescent lights. which for
green reas
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). Graveyard you worked more than 40 hours but it spanned to the next week and so no over
time.
7 straight days, at the end you had 5 days off, then day shift which were training days, as the day shift had enough to control the operations.
Shift work? (Score:2)
I don't know about you, but I feel much better when I shift work onto someone else.
Been there, done that... (Score:2)
One thing that lasts - I now have no time for people who say that certain things should be open at certain times of day. Example; don't serve beer/wine until noon. Back when I worked shift, most people's morning was my evening. If I fancy a beer with my dinner at 8 am, so what? I remember hanging around with fellow shift workers 'til 11
My "me too" anecdote (Score:2)
Due to some medical problems involving endocrinology, I imagine my body being somewhat more sensitive to hormonal/nutrient changes than the norm. Nothing insurmountable - apart from my chronic medication, the normal rules of eating healthily, exercising, and getting enough sleep seem to do the trick well enough to see me through the normal day-to-day.
A year or two ago I started in a job that required (tele or physical) presence for releases every second week (a lot of people where involved each time, it mo
"Shit work" (Score:1)
Did anyone else read the headline as "Shit work..."? I think it's high time for a coffee and / or new glasses ;)
Shift work?? (Score:1)
I didn't get past the paywall, so I have to ask:
What kind of work are they talking about?
Workers who change schedules more than once a week, like some of the police departments, and try to stay awake both night and day?
Or workers who stay on a night shift perminantly, and get used to the schedule?
That is a -huge- difference. I worked "12 on and 12 off" for six months and was fine after the first week. But they did have "daylight" lights for working.
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Yet you show none of his talent...