I work in a hotel, and I'm on the front desk, but I started as housekeeping and then moved up. When I moved up I was still working housekeeping, but I was also working graveyard and swing shift. Housekeeping shift started around 8-9 am, swing goes from 3-11 pm, and graves is from 11pm-7am so my sleep schedule was all over the place. Sometimes I would get off a swing and have to stay up the rest of the night so I could sleep the next day and work that night, sometimes I would get off a graveyard shift and have to immediately go home and get to sleep so I could wake up at 3 for swing shift, a few times I had to get off housekeeping and either go cover swing at 3, or try and sleep long enough to stay awake for a graveyard shift, and I'm an insomniac, so sleep doesn't come easy, and my sleeping pills take a few hours to kick in.
Eventually I was off housekeeping and just working the two shifts on front, but the regular graveyard was an older woman, and she and her husband had numerous health issues, so I'd often be called in to cover for her, or she'd get sick and I'd be working for weeks at a time because no one else knew how the fuck to run the audit. One time, after working a week straight I finally got a night off and happily put myself into a NyQuil induced coma, only to be awoken by a phone call because the regular graveyard worker had to leave for a family emergency.
Then the regular graveyard worker had to retire for health reasons, and I was on straight graves, and I'm loving it, but there are still problems. Another housekeeper moved up to front desk, and I trained her to do my job, so the poor woman has the same insane schedule as I did, although I try to be considerate as possible because I was in her shoes for like two years. Recently I was throwing up my entire shift because it was the middle of the night and I didn't want to have to wake her and call her in, but after that I was out for a week straight with the manager trying to bully me into coming in, even though the doctor hadn't cleared me. Now the other graveyard has strep throat and I'm the one working for weeks straight with, again, the manager trying to get the sick employee back at work so their absence doesn't fuck over the rest of the schedule, and he won't train anyone else for nights.
He hasn't bothered trying to step up and cover a graveyard, even though he'd covered day shifts before when we were short staffed, and tbh, I think it's because he doesn't know how to run the audit. I don't have any real proof for this, but we recently switched over to a new system. For the new system we had to undergo a couple of days of training to learn how to use the damn thing, and that training was basically useless and needlessly complex, so I, for one, just brute forced my way through and learned as I was checking guests in. For the night audit, the graveyard workers had to come in a little before midnight for a zoom meeting covering how to run the audit, which was also completely useless so I had to figure that out for myself too.
I get that it can be hard to find someone to work graves, and it could throw a wrench in some peoples' schedules, but harassing someone while they're home sick on doctor's orders to try and get them back in is not only a dick move, but it's also a health risk for employees and customers, and it shows a supreme lack of forethought and planning. What happens if we're both out sick? What happens if one or both of us is hospitalized? What if something happens and one or both of us is out of reach? What if one or both of us want to take a vacation and leave the country? Seriously, it's not a difficult job, you're basically just transferring raw data into an excel spreadsheet and emailing it to the owner and the accountant, it's not a difficult job to train for, and this lack of planning is bound to lead to a major catastrophe, it's practically asking for trouble because Murph's law is absolute, and Murphy is a petty, vindictive asshole.