On Monday, I worked continuously until midnight. In my profession, I have experienced this kind of thing often, but now that I am older, it still affects me physically until the next day or two.

Late night work

My day job is managing and troubleshooting problems in the manufacturing industry. I myself am only off during the day, as per the calendar, but the site is a 24-hour continuous operation, so when problems occur, I have to work until midnight and respond to calls during the night and on holidays.

I used to get a call every weekend about a problem. Now, unless it is a very big problem, I don’t get a call from them. I am not called as often at night or on holidays as I used to be.

Evening trouble is hard

However, if a problem occurs in the evening, we have to stay and deal with it until it is resolved. In this case, I had to deal with the problem from the afternoon until midnight the next day.

After the trouble was resolved, I returned home, had dinner (I doubt if I can call it dinner) and a bath, and then the sky began to lighten.

Fortunately, the next day, Tuesday, was a holiday in Japan, so I spent the day sleeping. However, it was difficult to sleep with the body and brain in a state of excitement immediately after returning home. It was not until the afternoon that I was able to get a good night’s sleep.

It has been a long time since I have had a day off only to end up sleeping.

Better than before

When I was younger, I would sometimes work from the previous day until the next morning, and then continue to work a regular shift until the evening before returning home. The longest I worked was 36 hours straight.(Although there were breaks along the way.)

In this day and age, that kind of workday is not acceptable, so recently the practice has changed so that when a worker continues to work until the next morning, he or she reports and takes over the work and goes home.

Still, a few times a year, I may work a shift like this one.

Difficulty in passing on technology and training young people

Looking back on this trouble, I believe the following issues were involved

• Technology related to new equipment is biased toward certain individuals.
• If that person is not available, the manufacturer will be contacted to take care of the problem.
• It takes time to get in touch with the manufacturer’s technicians.
• Since the process is done over the phone, it is difficult to work through each one.

The training on the equipment in this case was not received by all at the same level, but was a skill and knowledge that only certain younger members of the team had. The problem was that when those young people were not available, the other members of the team could not cope with the situation.

Conversely, there is also the problem of young people not being able to develop their skills because they are being handled by more experienced people. This problem becomes apparent after the veterans retire.

Difficult to counteract, but must be done

Perhaps you are facing similar problems in the manufacturing industry.We see rejection, “I can’t do all that” and “I don’t have time to do it”

Even in such a situation, I have to solve them one by one.

This time, although it took some time, I managed to solve the problem and continue production. I have informed the person in charge about the problems in the process of restoration, and we hope that they will be improved in the future.

Musubi

One of the reasons I have not been able to update this blog lately is that I am busy with my day job.

Since I am in charge of dealing with these problems and a bit of a sensitive job, I am unable to switch off my mind when I get home.

I would like to use this holiday to rebuild a bit.