As I began doing overtime at my job, I kind of thought that two hours was the max. If I knew then that there was a stated, ironclad reason why, I don't remember that now. Since the New Year, when my longtime co-worker retired and no one has been hired in her place and (maybe) work has ramped up, staying ten hours simply has not been enough to get through all the work. The changes recently made to The Third Department (and I might go more in-depth as to my thoughts about them, but they still haven't been fully formed) have so far been cosmetic. There hasn't been much we no longer have to do, and while there has been a de-emphasis on what work is a priority, we who work back there still run into the problem of the work needs to get done. We can leave early and leave work for the next day, but it still needs to get done, and if more work the following day is waiting for us as well -- well, we would just need to stay much later the next day to prevent carryover work to snowball. So, why in the hell don't we just stay late the first day -- which is what we're doing now?
I was working The Fourth Department yesterday/Monday. I think that, overall at least, shit hasn't hit the fan when it comes to that department as opposed to The Third Department, but while there are times when the workload actually is manageable, there are times when it goes absolutely haywire, like yesterday/Monday. There is someone on Sunday who can do some of the work, but she is working other departments on that day, so she is doing all she can and leaving the rest to the person working that department on Mondays. That was me, obviously, and I was hit with several dozen forms that hadn't been touched yet. Compound that with another, oh, 18-20 forms that came in new yesterday/Monday (which is an exorbitant amount to come in on Mondays, but the lab has been backed up all year as well), and I had, well, a lot of work. I will not say the number of forms I had to do is a daily record; I have roughly the same amount of forms I have had to do a few times before. But I found it so damn difficult to get through all of them for some reason that I knew by around 3 o'clock that I was staying an extra two hours ... at least.
Once I realized the enormity of work that still needed to be done, I had to decide when I was simply going to give up and leave work. I think my objective was to simply touch every single form that came through. Once I did that and performed my very important end-of-day tasks, I had stayed 10 1/2 hours. I have been creeping past two hours of OT several times lately. But the work hasn't gotten done and, frankly, I'm getting the sense that my bosses are permitting that because even he knows it's a lot of work. So, ten hours and a minute became ten hours and five minutes which became ten hours and 15 minutes which became, well, now.
And still I have a lot of e-mails that provide the information I need to "finish" a form, and I usually try and stay late to get through all of them, but I was staying so late to work on new stuff that I didn't get to them, at all. When I come into work today/Tuesday, I will have at least two dozen of those types of e-mails to get through. That, to me, is yesterday's stuff, and that will delay the point in time when I can get to today's stuff. The later it is, the more likely (obviously) I have to stay late, and this is Tuesday, when we usually get the most work in the week because that is when most of the forms from the weekend get here. So I am already mentally preparing to stay 11 hours at work today/Tuesday, knowing full well that I still might have to leave work for the next day (which I have off, but I don't feel like being a dick and leaving a bunch of work for the person following me).
It is getting ridiculous. It does feel as though I could, and I might have to, work 24 hours straight in order to get my job done. But as I have alluded to before, I am trying to do my job, and it looks as though my higher-ups are letting me. I am at peace with my ten-hour-plus days, at least for now, because the workload ain't changing anytime soon and, yes, I need the money. So I will keep doing what I need to either do my work completely or not go insane. If my boss puts his foot down and tells me to leave after a certain point in the day -- well, I probably will object, but let's just cross that bridge if and when we get there.
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