I work in the kitchen at a 24 hour truck stop. We have two shifts: the morning shift 4am-12pm, and the afternoon shift 12pm-8pm. I was hired for the later shift several months ago, and it hasn’t been too bad.
Last month my coworker who works the morning shifts on weekends got himself fired and they have delegated that shift to me. Problem is they didn’t change anything else about my schedule except for moving me to the first shift on Saturday and Sunday.
So what this means is that every Friday for the last month or so I leave work at 8pm, and by the time I get home, shower and cook dinner, it’s like 10:30 and I literally have 5 hours before I have to go to work again.
I just don’t sleep. To me it’s more worth it to actually have some free time between shifts than to get a few hours of sleep.
This really fucks me up though. My weekends feel like a dimension where time flows backwards. I’ll be deadass zombie tired, but it’s like 2pm. I’m not someone who can get real sleep in the middle of the day, I might manage a two hour nap.
What ends up happening is I’m awake for like 30 straight hours between Friday and Saturday, and I’m working for 16 of them. For the last month my weekends have been 24 hours of work between noon Friday and noon Sunday (a 48 hour period) and I get no sleep in the middle.
Shit is getting rough, but I’m not really sure what to do about it. The kitchen manager doesn’t give a shit because “(She) had to work like that before too” and the actual store manager says she’s trying to help me out but she having trouble hiring anyone to work at 4am on the weekend (gee, I wonder why).
I interviewed for a job that was paying more last week, but they said they start everyone part time, so I mentioned I would need to still work a few shifts at my other job. Probably why I haven’t heard back.
I’m trying to find a solution that’s not “just fuckin’ quit”, because the job really isn’t too bad. I make more than minimum wage in a very poor state so I can pay the bills, and it has some perks like free food, no micromanaging, and I can smoke up in my car while I’m on the clock.
I appreciate it if you have advice or are just commiserating.