A medical resident worked 207 hours of overtime in a month. His case highlights Japan’s continuing problem with karoshi - death by overwork.
A medical resident worked 207 hours of overtime in a month. His case highlights Japan’s continuing problem with karoshi - death by overwork.
American here, I’ve done about 200 hours of OT in a month. Going much beyond that is pretty hard. During that month I went to work, stayed until I could no longer function, went home, slept, woke up, went back to work, stayed until I could no longer function… repeat for a month. Getting to 250 would have meant actively choosing not to sleep. During my month I’d be at work for 20-25 hours at a time usually, but I’d sleep until I woke up naturally before going back in.
I did 135 hour week once as a journalism intern. got fired because I didn’t do 140 (would walk to hotel, sleep 4 hours, wake up, walk back to field office - “wow,” you think, “what war was he covering?” and the answer is the war of an arts festival in northern england).
didn’t go back to journalism after that.
That sounds like it should violate all kinds of labor laws. Even if you slept the second you were off the clock and started working the second you woke up, it would only give you 4 hours of sleep, working 7 days per week… no time to even shower. You were right for quitting that nonsense.
Mine was all voluntary, so if I didn’t show up for a day, no one was going to yell at me or anything. If someone said I had to do it, I probably would have quit, lol. Throughout the time I did it, a lot of others would come in and do a day or two, then go back to their old normal work schedule with no repercussions.
oh absolutely it was illegal, and I did it with full knowledge of it, and voluntarily, for a stipend instead of pay.
just no point in being litigious when I’m just as happy to have a good story out of it.
I hope you’re in a less shitty environment now, whatever field that may be in
Why did you work that much?
It was actually kind of enjoyable. I worked in a data center that was being decommissioned. I’d work 8 hours doing my normal job, then head out into the data center with tools of destruction to enact my revenge and rip it all apart piece by piece. I wasn’t required to do it, but it was a nice break from the normal. It was like being Peter at the end of Office Space, but without needing to quit my job. The only other people working on it were basically friends at that point, so we got to hang out, and the paychecks were pretty good with all that OT. It was also nice to see physical progress to work I was doing, which is pretty rare in knowledge work. It’s not something I could do long-term, but for a few months, knowing there was a defined end, I look back at the time fondly.
Good stuff. I worked crazy like that once before too, during the Kaseya ransomware breach. Was the specialist rebuilding functioning AD and recovery efforts in over 50 companies that month. It was a wild time, everything was on fire, so it was constant triage and scary recoveries (some lost absolutely everything - test your backups folks)
Would 100% do it again but like you mentioned you knew it was very temporary. Doing that long term is insanity
What job was that, if I may ask?