🙌 THE 4 DAY WORK WEEK HAS HIT IRELAND WITH ASTONISHING RESULTS. 🙌

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

26. Back when the 40 hour work week was introduced, captains of industry pissed and moaned,

saying employees absolutely had to work 12 hours/day for capitalism to succeed. Well. Astonishingly (really not so astonishingly) they discovered that employees working 8 hours were far more productive than those working 12 hours. Huh. Imagine that.

This is among the reasons I'm extremely concerned that these days most nurses work a 12 hour shift. I don't give a flying fuck that you are only working three days a week. I do NOT want to be a patient having a crisis when you are 11 hours into your shift.

I've worked long hours. I know what it is like. I was an airline ticket agent at National Airport in Washington DC in the 1970s. Many times I worked ten, twelve, sometimes even more hours when flights were delayed or cancelled. As miserable as it was, at least no lives depended on my being alert my entire shift. I might have made mistakes, but no one's life was in danger.

Here's something else to contemplate. A while back I read an interesting article, possibly on the NYTimes that talked about the work culture in the world of Apple, and said that the first I-phone would have come to market two years earlier had there not been a culture of working 16-20 hours per day. Two years earlier. Think about that.

No one, no one at all, can work 16 hours a day and be truly productive.

I honestly think that the main reason I am absolutely the healthiest person I know at my age is that I have mostly gotten enough sleep most of my life. Getting enough rest is crucial. My entire life, and I'm now 74 years old, I've done my best to get enough sleep. That has not always been possible, especially during my years at DCA. I more than once worked a scheduled turn-around, getting off at 10pm, being back at the airport at 6am the next day. But if the evening flight ran late, who knows when I'd get off? I still had to be at work at 6am. Heck, one time I actually slept on a cot behind our ticket counter because it would have taken too much time to take the bus back home, then gotten up to take the bus back to the airport. I was better off spending the night. Fortunately, a good friend who worked the overnight shift at one of the rental car companies woke me up in the morning with a cup of coffee (bless you Ollie). When startled passengers looked at me the next morning (mainly those who'd been held overnight when their flight had been cancelled, and were now heading out) and asked in dismay, "Did you spend the night here?" I lied and said no.

Back then I was young, in my 20s, and I could do it. Ahh, youth.

These days? I'm cancelling jury duty because I can't imagine getting up early enough to drive from Santa Fe to Albuquerque to make a 9am jury duty thing.