#those 2 songs in particular have been infecting my brain since Friday

[sammy8d257]

Well, well, look who's inside again,

Went out to look for a reason to hide again,

Well, well, buddy you found it,

Now come out with your hands up

We've got you surrounded

-"Look Who's Inside Again" and "Goodbye" by Bo Burnham

I watched Bo Burnham's Inside special last friday and I-

I'm feeling a certain way tonight bois

[mari-vargas]

Hello sudden burst of energy from the what feels like a miracle I received today. I have three stories I’d like to share today, let’s see how many I actually get to today. (Keywords so I’ll remember the other two: sinusitis and unlimited) Two are older stories and the third is of my week this week and said miracle.

(Continuing this the next day; as it turns out said burst of energy basically managed to get me home from work.)

So, “spoiler alert”, the miracle I mentioned is merely that I do not need to go in to work on my regular weekend days. The story however is about why that wound up feeling like a miracle.

I suppose the best place to start is that where I work is a 24/7/365 operation. It never stops, not whole cloth. I work in the quality lab (which handles both quality control and quality assurance simultaneously). Nothing can operate without passing through the lab which means that if the lab goes down so does everything else on site. There’s a couple different types of shifts on site for the needs of the particular areas, but in the lab we have 8hour shifts 5days a week. My shift is day shift, Thursday-Monday (my weekend is Tuesday/Wednesday).

If we need an extra person or someone calls off and needs to be covered etc, one of the other analysts will be assigned to work said extra shift as overtime (OT). For the most part we have this volunteer declaration where we the analysts can declare what days we are willing to work OT if needed. If there are not enough yes’s to cover what’s needed, then there’s the likelihood of forced OT which goes by lowest hours, and if there are two people tied for lowest hours then whoever has the lowest seniority. Many of the analysts try to take as much OT as they can because they appreciate the boost in their paycheck. As such, others who don’t want it generally don’t need to. I am one of the analysts who is no across the board, primarily because while I am in a much better place than high school when I had insomnia I still have issues with sleep and I live an hour away from where I work which in total means that for an “8 hour shift” I’m actually away from home for 11 hours. A 16 hour shift means that, if I get a hotel room (of which generally the closest to my work is about half an hour away) I can maybe just wrangle half of my typical amount of sleep.

Now, on occasion I will volunteer on my “Friday” because by volunteering I can get my hours averaged in so that I’m no longer on the bottom of the totem pole. I did so a couple months ago because I was getting forced OTs over and over and needed to be able to do certain things and know that yes I actually could guarantee my availability on a given day or time. And by volunteering on my “Friday” I then had my weekend to recover without having to do a turn around PLUS if I were to volunteer on one of my weekend days I’m pretty much guaranteed winding up with a double. So anyways I did so I’d be averaged in…only to have that only last about 2 weeks.

Before I go any further: why is there so much OT right now? Well let’s back it up to…I think January of this year. One of our grave shift analysts realized he was making far more in passive income from his real estate business than as working as an analyst and so he moved on. Before our bosses had even started getting any bites for that, another analyst (now from day shift) snagged a position at a different site in the company in a higher position than he was in with us. Ok so far not too bad really. Right around the same time another day shift analyst had to go out for a couple of months due to foot surgery—on both feet and obviously not at the same time. It’s not been almost 6 months and we still don’t know yet when she’ll be cleared to come back (secret aside from my brain—if she even does choose to come back). Okay, okay, well…we’ve still got this… After a bit our most senior analyst volunteered to temporarily switch to the open grave shift because that’s the roughest to try and cover with OT. She was on day shift (for those keeping count that is now 3 people short all from day shift but that’s our largest shift: 3 on grave, 4 on swing, 8 on day). Vacations hit and boy did they hit hard but in all honesty not as bad as November when we had one analyst test positive for covid on the rapid test performed by Occ Heath on site (he went to his doctor that same day for the more reliable test but that takes longer for results and it came back negative but damage done we were dealing with I think only 7 analysts then due to potential exposures—ps we’re pretty sure by now he’s essentially an anomaly for the rapid test because it almost happened again but he got retested after some bureaucratic fumbling and got two negatives after the once again false positive). But we were managing..sort of. Another day shift analyst went out a couple months ago for either medical or vacation reasons I’m not sure. And about a month ago we had a third analyst leave our employ, her being from swing shift and in a relationship with the guy who left for real estate. Her two weeks notice had come before any new hires had started with us, of which we had three because boy oh boy we’ve been drowning because of course with everything opening back up companies who are customers to us or who use what we produce and needing way more to get back up and running and everything is backed up—ling and short we’ve had extra work plus a lot of special samples that by now really each constitute a whole new bench not to mention a new segment of production being tested out and potentially going to be a new product to be sold… Anyways our bosses had managed to convince their higher ups to let them higher one more person than the number who had left (again, at the time, 2). So they had told the first two at the same time, got permission for the third, then before the next onboarding third analyst leaves, so the bosses tell the fourth and final applicant who made it to the interview level that hey you’re in too. They managed to get the first two into a special, sooner onboarding and three weeks later the third started her onboarding and now half a month to a monthish later we’re still waiting for the fourth and I personally don’t know when they’ll be going us.

But anyways we currently have 3 (eventually 4) new hires training and it takes about six months to train said new hires on each bench, two weeks with a senior analyst two weeks alone rinse and repeat until you’ve gone through all benches. So…it’s gotten easier with the first two already having one bench under their belt. But I’ve gotten fairly off track to explain the background of my story. I’ve actually not had too terribly many forced OTs since the first two new hires finished their first 2 weeks and could be on their own on their first bench. Even when they moved to new benches.

So imagine, if you will, I walk in on Thursday, I’ve just come off my weekend which I spent up in the mountains with my SO because said SO is starting a new job with a school district as an IT person so we will no longer have any sort of overlap of days off except holidays. The grave analyst working the bench right by the door greets me as he usually does regardless of what bench he’s on. He says good morning, I say it back, only he then follows it up with something along the lines of “are you ready for your back to back double on your next weekend?” Yeah. I was on the schedule for four forced OTs as a “double-double” instead of having my days off. Cue the existential dread settling in. I moved throughout the day with that hanging on me, coming to terms with it. At afternoon lineout I caught a small break in that the analyst I’d be covering for on swing piped up “hey there was an error in the system, I only asked for Tuesday off”. Okay cool that makes 3 forced OTs instead…somehow already felt lighter. The next morning I take over from the most senior analyst who’d been on my bench that night and she offers to take my Tuesday swing OT “if I didn’t want it” since she’d be working day shift that day and her weekend is Monday/Tuesday (confusing but basically means she could do a day/swing double because she wouldn’t be working grave into day double). Okay cool…that would leave me with just the two day shifts over my weekend. Then throughout Friday my post nasal drip I woke up with starts getting really annoying as a runny nose. Saturday and the runny nose is also pressure in my sinuses. Sunday and I’m sure it’s a sinus infection despite my efforts to stop it. (I have a history with them and to any concerned over covid I get a weekly test at work and I was negative during this.) I will say though, my efforts seem to have made it a faster turn around than usual. Come Monday and I’m driving to work filled with existential dread because I don’t want to call off when I have these OTs because I had to do that last time (basically woke up late, anxiety blew up into a full blown panic attack caused me to throw up and wound up putting me out of commission with migraines and nausea and more various degrees of panic attacks until Saturday of that week…well the panic attacks continued but eventually tapered off to usual manageable levels). So anyways the posted schedule still has me for the double on Tuesday and day on Wednesday. The analyst who had previously offered to take the Tuesday swing was working OT that day and came up to me in the middle of the swift to ask if I had talked with the boss that makes the schedule about her offering to volunteer for me. Regardless of my thoughts on that, what I told her was that I had not yet, and after she reiterated her song and dance about how she’d volunteer if I didn’t want it I went straight up to that boss’s door and let her know. Turns out she was speaking with another of the bosses about the schedule because one of the first two of the new hires had already gotten the hang of the new bench after only a week and that coupled with us finally getting caught up on the extra samples because that same said bench had something happen at one of the plants it covers which then went down which lightened the load for like three different benches and yeah long story short she no longer needed so many people working overtime.

So she says to me, essentially, “how attached are you to working those day shift OTs on your weekend?” tells me the new hire is fine on his own et cetera et cetera. And guys? Tears immediately rushed to my eyes so fast and hard that they immediately flow down my face. It feels like the sky has opened and the sun has sought me out just to shine a warm beam of light through my heart. A burble of laughter bursts up my throat and out of my hardly used mouth (as I hadn’t spoken much at all that day). For those who have seen Rise of the Guardians it looked like a happy flake had landed on my nose. She says “There’s your smile! You’ve been looking so tired today and I was wondering why, but then I saw this schedule and realized it was preemptive exhaustion from what you had looking ahead.” During afternoon lineout she very pointedly wished me a happy Friday.

So yeah…it shouldn’t really be a miracle, but wow does it feel like one.