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National Third Shift Workers Day 2024
Today is National Third Shift Workers Day so keep it down. They’ve been busting their arses all night and they really need their sleep. I can vouch.
🎼All Night Long🎶
The best workers, like the happiest livers, look upon their work as a kind of game: the harder they play the more enjoyable it becomes. ~Robert Baden-Powell
If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life (or so they say). To an extent, that’s true.
When you like what you do, it’s far less like work than the drudgery typically qualified as work.
Even so, I like what I do. Yet it can still be a slog sometimes.
That’s fine. I’d rather get periodically bored or stressed out about stuff I like to do than to have to do something completely onerous.
I even liked what I did when I was working at the trash bag factory. I had a lot of fun at that place.
Despite the deafeningly loud machines, the long hours, the horrific temperature extremes and hectic pace, it was still more fun than not.
As a natural night owl, the 3rd Shift at the factory appealed to me. I could work during what, for me, are peak hours and then sleep all day.
It was pretty nice to work three days and have two off. After that kind of churn, you definitely needed the recovery time.
It was also nice that the rotational schedule made it so that some of your off days were during the week. This facilitated errand running.
All things being equal, I prefer being back at the keyboard. I can still appreciate Third Shift and give a hearty shout out to my former coworkers and anybody else working overnight.
🎼It’s Like That🎶
How to work 3rd shift
I think the biggest hazard of working 3rd Shift was that the machines were so loud that the only thing I could hear was my internal playlist. Problem was that on more than one occasion, I got stuck with at least 8 continuous hours of the Popeye Scat version of Take Me To Church. I mean, damn, I don’t even really like that song. Talk about your tortuous earworms…
On the other hand, when the factory was ridiculously cold, having an internal playlist set on Miami Sound Machine helped me stay warm. The infectious beat and Gloria Estefan’s lovely voice kept me going for hours. My coworkers were amused by my dancing, but the extra movement helped circulate blood to keep my arms and legs warm in the chilly expanse of the factory.
🎼Mr. Roboto🎶
The job market of the future will consist of those jobs that robots cannot perform. Our blue-collar work is pattern recognition, making sense of what you see. Gardeners will still have jobs because every garden is different. The same goes for construction workers. The losers are white-collar workers, low-level accountants, brokers, and agents. ~Michio Kaku
Eventually, perhaps, but not just yet. The large language models that serve as AI today are still pretty prone to “hallucinations” at this point.
Also, how could a robot not serve as a gardener? If they’re programmed to attend to the watering and pruning, they’d be excellent gardeners. They may not necessarily be artistically inclined, but doing scheduled routines is literally the primary purpose of a robot.
In the short term, workers who are displaced by robots can be retrained to design, build, program, install, maintain, deconstruct and recycle robots.
When one door closes, two typically open. There is a ton of opportunity with every new advance in technology.
Moving on and modernizing can be scary to some people but if you keep an open mind, you’ll find the future is pretty bright.
As for the writing, I’ve finally finished up some pieces of day work that have been occupying maximum brain cycles.
I got some more writing done out of sheer orneriness, but it’s not what you’d call a keeper.
I’ve been rampaging through my collection of AuthorTube videos on how to do this and that so I can get in the right frame of mind to do some stuff I can actually keep.
Happy Hump Day, everyone. I hope you get some sleep no matter what time you hit the sheets.