Topsy Turvy
Three nights a week, I work in-house at the Irish Times doing production for the website. When I started night shifts I worried if I’d be able to stay awake as I’m naturally more of a lark than an owl, but harsh strip-lighting, chatty colleagues and gallons of tea means that’s not a problem.
What is a problem is that doing three nights and then freelancing during the day means I feel permanently topsy turvy. I do sleep in after a shift but I also try to slot back into sync with the rest of the world when I’m off, meaning that I’m always altering my working hours and the time I’m going to bed. It’s like having a constant case of jet lag.
Every so often a study is published linking shift work to cancer or a shortened lifespan, most of which I try to ignore. What I’m more interested in, because I can feel them directly, are the immediate effects. Mentally, I’ve noticed that when I’m on a run of shifts my concentration span is shorter and my short-term memory is terrible. Physically, I have lower energy levels and I get hungry at strange times. My colleagues and I all put on weight when we started thanks to 11pm hunger pangs.
Thankfully my shifts aren’t all-nighters – we tend to finish around 2am – although it takes me a while after getting home before I wind down enough to want to go to sleep. I can’t imagine how the people who do the late-all night-early shift rotations feel.
Tonight’s the last of my night shifts for a while but I have a feeling it’s going to be a long one because today the Irish government are unveiling their austerity budget. Hopefully it won’t take me long to get back to normal but who knows what normal will look like tomorrow?
Job satisfaction
It’s not a great time for employment. The private sector has been feeling the effects of the recession for a couple of years now and has responded accordingly – we’ve seen job losses, recruitment moratoriums, pay freezes (or cuts) and the cancellation of Christmas parties. Thanks to planned spending cuts in both Ireland and the UK, traditionally safe public sector jobs are now also under threat. There’s pretty much no one left whose job hasn’t been touched by the financial crisis at some level.
So why is job satisfaction climbing?
A recent survey carried out by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that job satisfaction in the UK climbed seven points* in the last quarter, a phenomenon they describe as a ‘fixed grin’ response to uncertainty. In the words of Oscar Wilde (who I’m not obsessed with, but who does provide some pretty apposite quotes): “The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.”
*The satisfaction score climbed from +35 to +42, where the score is measured by subtracting the percentage of employees dissatisfied with their jobs from the percentage satisfied.
Things people do
When I was a child, I had a book called Things People Do, which was about the imaginary island of Banilla and all the people who lived there. It was an idyllic land of full employment and careers for life – everyone had a job they loved and a specific role to play in society. They were even named after their jobs (or maybe born into them), from Penny Sillin the doctor to Manuel Labour the builder.
Anyway, it was my first careers book and I loved it. I spent hours imagining who I would be when I grew up and changed my mind constantly (although Mayor Naze seemed to be in charge of most things and lived in a mansion so I thought that would be a pretty cool gig). I had no clue how anybody could narrow down their choice to doing just one job when faced with so many attractive options. If I’m honest, I still don’t.
It took me a while to decide to train as a journalist and, even though I love it, I remain fascinated by the careers I didn’t choose. One of the reasons I write about work issues is that it gives me the perfect excuse to find out what it might have been like had I become a magician or an undertaker.
So, this is a blog dedicated to the things people do – and why, how, when and where they do them. We may not live in an idyllic land of full employment but it’s still a pretty interesting world out there.
