I have a particularly strange schedule, and I bet some of you do too. Tell me about yours! I’m on a 28 day rotational shift (dupont modified). All shifts on are 12 hours with half being am-pm and half being pm-am. Of those 28 days, I work 14, the other 14 are off, 7 days in a row every rotation as well. I love it but the days can be long sometimes.
I burned out and can now barely look after myself let alone my property. Thus work for me is existing. Actual paid employment would literally destroy me. The medication doesn’t help much.
But if you want interesting shift patterns, I was once on a rotating days and nights schedule that was a lot tighter at one end than four-on, four off. Day shifts were eight hours but staff were staggered so all hours from 8am to 6pm were covered. Nights were always 8pm to 8am. (On-call and a different team covered 6pm to 8pm.)
The worst part of it was that you could finish a day shift at 6pm and need to be in work for a night shift at 8pm the following day. 26 hours to adjust. That was all.
The best part was if your night shifts ended and the recovery time led into a weekend where there was no day shift. That made for nearly a week off, which happened about three times a year.
But absolutely none of that made up for the way it messed with my sleep schedule. I thought being a night owl would make it easy. I was wrong and it severely weakened me.
And it took several years of a different but increasingly stressful (days-only) job before I broke completely.