Whatsa Shit Shift?

There's all kinds of work hours you can arrange from M-F 9-5 to OT to OnCall to Off-Shift to Shit Shift. I got some Blogging ideas today and this is a little background for some upcoming posts.

I work in large data center support. The main difference between a large data center (a company that has billions in revenue) and smaller ones is the impact a data center problem can have.

In a large data center, serious problem resolution is measured in minutes, outages are measured in thousands of dollars per minute, lost productivity is measured in thousands of people unable to work.

This is not the career you choose for M-F 9-5. Even data center upper management does not have that luxury. The experienced technicians and 1st level managers are at the battlefront 24/7/365.

But we're not talking about PCs that need rebooting several times a day, or hard disk failures every year, or OS installs every other year. This environment is very mature, very stable, very regimented so you can live a fairly normal life, albeit with the electronic tether (text pager/cell/blackberry). You learn to go from deep sleep to coherent speech to logged on in a minute. The stray wrong number in the middle of the night wonders who they've got when you start asking them technical questions.

When my wife hinted at restricted visitation, I was very bothered. As a father who cares the idea of separation from my son was much more disturbing then separation from my wife, who was doing her level best to goad me into the divorce.

So what's someone in my line of work to do? I did the unthinkable, I lobbied, hard, for the dreaded shit shift and its perks that no one would take. Every time there was an opening, management would threaten sadistic rotating shifts to give everyone pain, disruption, and poor health. Unless the staff coughed up a sacrificial volunteer. Someone to stand up and say "Ey, I'll take it Cap'n."

And so I did, much to my wife's dismay. Why? Three days off, M, Tu, Wed and maybe more, and shift differential (extra money). Sounds alluring, all you need to do is work the shit shift at least 10 hrs/day Th-Sun. Oh there's more. Vacation is fine, but not Sat & Sun, you get'em all, 52 of each. Maybe a double (16 hours straight) now and then. Oh and since there are few takers, we're talking skeleton crew, maybe just you, maybe a 2 hour overlap with the next shift.

Big deal what's going on during the weekend. Plenty. Risky stuff, that may send you scampering like a gerbil. A large data center never sleeps, especially when they have offshore operations half way across the world. It doesn't take much to go wrong on a skeleton crew to cause havoc when your staffed at 20-25%. Or you could look at it as the volunteer may need to peak out at 400-500%.

I started that job with over 25 years experience, all high end, high demand support. So it was nothing new. I remember one of my excellence nominations where the person was astounded, "How can you juggle all this without freaking out?" "It's easy," I said, "first, I have the experience, second, I know for a certain fact I will solve it, more than half the solution is in my head right now, so why should I be stressed?" I don't think of that as anything special, I figure, do anything for a quarter century and you should be good at it. (jqism)

I figured get the extra time off, to spend with my son, it will be a good trade I figured. He'll be out for summer soon and I can spend three days a week with him. I figured wrong. My wife saw it coming so she took evasive action. First take her possession out of town (oh yeah, in our county and many across the United States a child is treated like property by the law). File suit, claim that a medical sleep problem (that is successfully treated) prevents me from caring for my son and asking for sole custody. For more about that tragic day click here.

Well I stayed on the shit shift in the hopes that one day I'd get a full day with my son, maybe even two or three in a row, that my home would be his too, that he'd sleep in his bedroom, but after two years, that was not to happen. It may someday as I prepare to enter post-decree action. But not likely this summer, the third summer he's never spent a whole day with his Father.

And the thing is, it wasn't a surprise. I knew it could happen. How? My wife threatened me often and convincingly that she would take her property (our son) from me. How convincingly? Good enough for a pair of counselors to caution her of the moral and ethical (but nor legal) violation it would be. Didn't that sway the court? Well no, all three legal firms I retained, did not bother to get that evidence submitted. Why? Cuz lawyers are lazy bastards, they have plenty of easy work they get paid the same high wage for.

Lawyers don't know what a shit shift is, and they certainly wouldn't volunteer to work one. What kind of fool am I then? One who'd take a shit shift, on just the chance, the off chance, that I could spend more time with the son I love. Well ya takes yer chances and sometimes ya come up short.