So we decided to change up schedules at the hospital where 2 of us will work 4 10-hour days and then alternate Mondays and Fridays off each month. This is the first week and it seems like it’s going to be pretty awesome. It’s great. And not just for the obvious reason.

Until this position, I don’t think I ever worked an 8 hour job. Out of college I had the bright idea that anything having to do with using my brain was common since everyone was doing it so I tried my hand at landscaping. Those days were the longest and hardest of my relatively cushy life by far. We worked 14-16 hour days doing manual labor. I quickly decided that kind of work was best left to guys who had the incentive and/or misfortune to work in the great Memphis outdoors in the middle of summer. I decided that using my brain actually wasn’t so bad after all so I moved back to Nashville in search of more intellectual work and landed a position at…

Circuit City was a hellhole. Maybe it’s better now, but I was required to work from 1 hour before opening (10am) until 1 hour after close (9pm) 4 days out of the week, and I worked the “short shift” of 10 hours in between. I did this for 1 year and realized that, in 1997, college graduates from a top 20 college should aim higher than retail salesmonkey. I did learn a lot about myself, though. I learned that I liked working with computers. I learned that I hated stupid people. I learned that farmers in Tennessee didn’t fucking need a $4000 computer. I learned that the hot, older sales woman in Appliances had hot, older girlfriends that liked to prey on young Asian computer salesmonkeys. I learned that I liked hot, older predatory women. Where was I going now? Shit…Oh yeah.

So I got rescued from the hellhole by applying to the Career Center at said college. They found me a job at an online radiology company where I learned a LOT from a man who knows infinitely more about computers than I’ll ever know now or ever. I was trying to fumble my way around PACS, RIS, Windows NT 4.0 Server, Sun Solaris, and Nortel Key systems. Most of you won’t know what those names mean and neither did I. So I tried to make up for my lack of skill by working 10 hour days (I know better now), even though my start time was off by a couple of hours relative to everyone else. I had a hard time getting up back then. But these were happy hours spent at the office though, because I was enjoying the learning experience. I truly had not enjoyed learning this much since the first time I heard ‘vagina’ in grade school during Health class.

So I moved to a financial company for financial reasons and put all that network and server administration to good use. As a help desk monkey. In case you don’t know what they do, help desk monkeys at financial institutions get to work long hours supporting assmonkeys. The only thing that made it tolerable was that I followed a really good friend to this company, and we went to eat Mexican food and play at the golf shop almost every day. Still, the hours were long, boring and consequently–miserable. And I worked with stupid people. I don’t mean stupid as in “somebody has a case of the Monday’s” stupid. I mean stupid as in “2 + 2 = kat” stupid. Through my good friend, I met my next boss and went back to healthcare, this time at the helm of my own ship.

More tomorrow on this long and tiresome retrospective on why going back to 10 hours is a good thing. Remember? I hope you remember that was my original point. I didn’t.

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