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Sep. 3rd, 2007 10:23 pmMy first Monday PM shift. Got to the office at lunch time, to enable me to get a meal in the canteen - very nice bacon steak today, followed by a rich treacle sponge - then watch almost all of Carry On Nurse in the coffee lounge before going on duty.
I'd never done a six hour shift before, so was expecting it to be a bit of a dog, and when I hadn't yet interviewed anyone in the first quarter-hour I was starting to think the shift was really going to drag. And then, still within the first half-hour, I had an elderly wife, who (presumably) didn't know her husband was helping us, pull the "I'm not interested"-then-play-deaf-and-hang-up routine on me. The rest of the shift wasn't at all bad, though; where you get a lot more people in in the evenings, it's quite a bit busier than the AM shift so the time seems to pass quicker.
A lot of the PM people signed their contracts under the old timetable, so they finish at 9.15. As nearly everyone stampeded out around me, I was just beginning my last interview, which ended bang on 9.30 - there was actually one more adult in the household, and she was happy to do the interview there and then, but I had to explain that we were closing - so, to allow for time entering my payclaim, binning my waste and putting my headset away, I tried to put my knocking-off time on my payclaim as 9.35. That, though, created a snag, as it took my shift to 6 hours 5 minutes. And if your working day is longer than 6 hours from beginning to end, you have to take an unpaid break of at least half an hour. Never mind that all the mini-breaks I'd taken didn't add up to that - the only way the system would let me claim a shift from 3.30 to 9.35 was if I entered an unpaid 30 minute break. So I was better off forgoing the extra 5 minutes and entering a plain 6 hour shift, so that's what I did.
Then out into the dark.
I'd never done a six hour shift before, so was expecting it to be a bit of a dog, and when I hadn't yet interviewed anyone in the first quarter-hour I was starting to think the shift was really going to drag. And then, still within the first half-hour, I had an elderly wife, who (presumably) didn't know her husband was helping us, pull the "I'm not interested"-then-play-deaf-and-hang-up routine on me. The rest of the shift wasn't at all bad, though; where you get a lot more people in in the evenings, it's quite a bit busier than the AM shift so the time seems to pass quicker.
A lot of the PM people signed their contracts under the old timetable, so they finish at 9.15. As nearly everyone stampeded out around me, I was just beginning my last interview, which ended bang on 9.30 - there was actually one more adult in the household, and she was happy to do the interview there and then, but I had to explain that we were closing - so, to allow for time entering my payclaim, binning my waste and putting my headset away, I tried to put my knocking-off time on my payclaim as 9.35. That, though, created a snag, as it took my shift to 6 hours 5 minutes. And if your working day is longer than 6 hours from beginning to end, you have to take an unpaid break of at least half an hour. Never mind that all the mini-breaks I'd taken didn't add up to that - the only way the system would let me claim a shift from 3.30 to 9.35 was if I entered an unpaid 30 minute break. So I was better off forgoing the extra 5 minutes and entering a plain 6 hour shift, so that's what I did.
Then out into the dark.
