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.
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