The 8-hour workday

“Welcome to an 8-hour day”

One of my co-workers made this comment to me at the end of an especially busy evening that kept me at work until 5.

Thank you, dear co-worker, for re-introducing me to the 8-hour-work-day. It has been a while. But we are actually old friends. If only you knew how many 50+ hour weeks I put in for this company before my arthritis got so bad. 8 hour work-day? For a while my norm was to come in about 8AM and work past 6. My record was a 21-hour workday with one 30-minute break. (For another company.)

Don’t take me wrong, dear co-worker. I am not angry about your remark. It was clever and delivered with good timing. But it also made me think back to the good ol’ days when I was young and it seemed like I could keep on going and going like an Energizer Bunny.

I have no desire at this point in my life to return to a 50 hour work week. But I am hopeful that some day I will be able to handle full time again. I even made myself a nice little schedule of how it would work, so that I can enjoy the benefits of part time while earning the money of full time:

M-F, 7:40AM-11:20AM, 12:36PM-3:36PM = 35
+ 5 hours over the weekend = 40 hours 🙂