I'm finally working

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Why wouldn't you go back?

Cmon, GWAsperger's, Please stop sabotaging yourself.

Please go to work tomorrow.

Yeah, you should go. We're all rooting for you

thank you .take your time....

Congrats! I've seen greeters at Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart sucks. It's experience though. But you can try to get something in a better environment, like libraries, universities ... places where people aren't asses.

I can't go back unless they let me work shorter shifts, according to my therapist.

Do you agree with your therapist? Do you feel capable of working your shift? I think that it's unlikely that management will accommodate you in this fashion. Almost anyone can be a greeter, and it'd be easier to just hire someone else.

Don't go back. Wal-Mart is evil.

I think it will look way better on your behalf and make you feel much better if you first try working regular shifts to the best of your abilities. For starters, that shows a willingness to stretch things out on your end even when a professional has said you cannot. That will make people more willing to accommodate your needs on their end. And if the issue is length of shifts, I am sure there could be ways to work with that while still working regular shifts.

What happened, though?

I know it really sucks and I don't like long shifts either but very long shifts are becoming the norm. It's hard for me to work 8 hour shifts but I'm reluctant to say that in meatspace when I know I'm in earshot of people who work 12 hour shifts. Many of the workers at my office work 14 hour shifts plus weekends and the whole time they have to sustain a breakneck pace. My office is no exception. I'm sure it's like that in many places and it's becoming more common. The 8 hour work day is becoming a thing of the past. The new normal is for people to spend most of their waking hours working. Read these if you don't believe me;
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... long-hours
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... -americans
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/06/ ... t-interns/

What you're saying is true for salaried workers--and especially IT workers in the US.

It's not true for hourly workers in the US, though. Hourly workers are usually required to receive overtime pay ("time-and-a-half) when they work either 40 hours per week, or 8 hours per day.

In a retail environment, most people work hourly--so, unless the company wants to pay through the nose, they work 40 hour weeks.

Yes. Exactly. I can attest to this. I've put in more than a few 120 hour work weeks (including weekends) of furious deadline driven mania. There was a hotel across the street from my last office that I spent more nights in than my own apartment, because the extra hour of commute time was needed for sleep. A guy just one office block from where I worked died from exhaustion.

I know that pain and suffering can't be compared between people, but working long shifts is very much a mind-over-matter thing. If you want to do it, you can get into the right head space to do it. The more difficult problem is managing the rest of your life.

OK, not true for retail workers but sometimes true for hourly workers. Some of the webpages I've read (from the US), for some hourly workers it's a regular occurrence because for them, certain types of work aren't considered "real work". For example, in my link there's a story of a hotel maid who spends 90 minutes folding towles every morning before she goes on the clock. I read another one or Quora Digest about a cook who spent hours per day chopping vegetables before he went on the clock.

For the maid, she had quotas for her 8 hours. Since the quota was impossible within 8 hours, she'd clock off, then continue cleaning rooms so it appeared to her employers that she made the quota within 8 hours.

Similar situation for the cook. He was in competition with the other cooks at the restaurant. In order to be competitive with each other, they'd clock off, walk 'round the block then go back to cooking for hours more (don't ask me why they need to walk 'round the block, it's just what I read).

I've seen the same thing firsthand at the office. A fair few of the workers are paid by the hour. The guy who sits across from did a few hours overtime. As is standard practice instead of paying him for the hours, they gave him time in lieu, so he got an afternoon off. He spent that morning in a mad rush trying to get all his tasks done before noon.That's terrifying!

Can I safely assume that you're an IT worker? In the last few months I've been wondering why I'm trying to break into an industry where this is commonplace (or is it just commonplace in any career field?)

I take it as a salaryman you weren't paid overtime, right? One of the things that bothers me about this is that I've heard that IT managers purposely place deadlines too early because they know that will force the devteam into longer hours, thus effectively giving the company more hours of work for the same salary.

If I may ask, what proportion of your weeks were spent in this kind of crunch? In a typical year would that be 10% of your weeks, 50%, etc? Also, what were your hours on a normal, noncrunch week?

I'm sure it was a well paid job but if you were paying hotel bills that would effectively decrease your salary. Hope that never happens to me because my commute is an hour each way.Yes, it's mind over matter and if I want it, I can push through it to achieve my career goals but there would always be a voice in the back of my head saying I'm a sucker, a lamb to the slaughter, that it's not for my goals but for theirs. Since I have a guilt complex I would probably do it willingly if I felt I'd been too slow in the past. I'd do it willingly if everyone was doing it.

Yet another thing that bothers me is that this is going from the exception to the norm. Workers will do it if their teammates are doing it and if one company does it, the others must follow suit to remain competitive. It's a tragedy of the commons. It's stuff like this that makes me wonder why will still bother to have Labour Day.

I've asked people on websites and meatspace about my fears of being overworked and about half of them said I was being paranoid and that the 40 hour week was here to say and the other half said my fears were valid (a few of the former group said 40 hours per week was too much, which confused me because it seems mild compared to the 120 hour week).

Apologies for hijacking your thread Girlwithaspergers.

Those stories you read are the exception, rather than the rule. Those companies, most likely, are violating US labor laws.

You're right: it seems as if more and more companies are trying to get slick and bend the rules to their advantage.

However, most companies stay within the rules. They're interested in remaining operational, and keeping employees. They pay hourly/non-exempt workers time-and-a-half after 40 hours/week or 8 hours/day if the overtime is mandatory.

Sometimes, though, their definition of "optional" crosses the line into "mandatory," without it being explicitly "mandatory." This is when it can get somewhat screwy.

I happened to be salaried, and non-exempt. I'm entitled to time-and-a-half after 40 hours/week if the overtime is MANDATORY. If it is "optional," I am given "comp time" in lieu of the overtime.

If a person is "salaried and exempt," the person is not entitled to overtime pay at all.