A bit of insanity... The place I'm now working (or orienting) has 10 hour shifts. Which is nice for work if it's not a crazy draining 10 hours. But... They're having me *train* on 10 hour day shifts, which start at 5am. Which happens to be about midnight in Australia. So you might say I'm starting out on 10 hour night shifts, though I did have a week of reacclimating to daylight here. But that was daylight - not getting up at 3am to be to work by 5? And now with the daylight savings change, I'll effectively be getting up at 2am? (or 11pm Australia?) Welcome back to work!
And training? It's like waking someone in the middle of the night and saying "hey - remember this", but the list is 100 items long.
Of course the upside is having three days off a week. Due to scheduling, I get four days off this week but on my first day off I automatically woke up at 3:15 am. That's good in terms of acclimating to my schedule (for the first month - but then I'll go to evening shift.
Of course in this small town, what's open at 3am? Maybe a gas station. And will I remember *anything* I attempted to stuff into my head in this time warp and after four days off? There are the tests I haven't done for 30 years... Some of them are surprisingly the same, but for the most part there's automation involved. And while the automation in itself is supposed to make things easier, it replaces the parts that are familiar with whole new layers of unfamiliar computer interface and machinery to be learned. Granted, once these interfaces and machines are learned, this will all be quite automatic - but for now it's five layers of screen menus; hundreds of new little icons (some so small and poorly rendered they're just tiny blobs recognized by color pattern and position; and maybe six new login / passwords?
What's interesting is that the new automation technology is getting good enough that a sophisticated battery of tests might be run by a high school graduate - except the machine interfaces and sequence of steps through the interfaces, as well as as the multi-systems interfaces and middleware are so complicated that it's a whole different type of expertise! And it's not programming, it's a combination of chemistry, statistics, and systems administration. At some point, someone could sort through all this, make all the interfaces more logical and straightforward, and improve the intercommunications between the machines with better middleware visualization. But the economic incentive seems to be to pay people like me (whose training is mostly the science end, and the programming end more a hobby and acclimation to modern reality).
Yesterday, a brilliant guy was having trouble with the middleware communicating. He tried resetting the software several times and resending; no go. He called IT, but a few minutes later, a late-70s-era-looking guy with a pony-tail just happened to be in the lab for something else - and the guy with the problem said "hey - Bob - you're an IT guy aren't you?" (meaning in his past that's what he did). Deadpan "Yeah. Did you try unplugging the bus?" I walk over with the guy to where there are about three RJ11 / RJ45 (?) to serial connectors and a modem. The guy unplugs one of them, points to the other one and says "Don't ever unplug that one. Last time it was unplugged, it took them a week to reset everything."
