Long Shifts

Paul, the lead engineer, turned to CEO John Breen with disbelief on his face.

“Those guys are back already?”

Construction was well underway at their company headquarters and the IT technicians had been working for the past three days on installing the new phone network. When John and Paul had left late the night before, Quartet employees were still toiling away. In the four years since hiring them, John had never seen them work so hard.

“I don’t think they ever actually left. But, until those phones are in, we’re bottlenecked,” stated John.

In fact, John knew without a doubt that Sean, Quartet’s Director of Operations, had been working straight for the last thirty hours. The others were staying in a hotel just down the road and would crash after each shift for a couple of hours before returning to work.

John didn’t know how much longer they could keep up their pace. Some of them seemed to be pretty out of it, although Sean had been confident with the quality of the work they had done so far.

“Just a day’s work left,” he had said the night before.

Returning about an hour later, John noticed that the Quartet technicians were packing up. He walked over to Sean who was in the process of throwing out a stack of used coffee cups.

“Finished already?” John asked.

“For now. There will be bugs that come up over the next couple of days, but we were able to get a big chunk of the work done.”

“I know how hard you guys worked and I really appreciate it.”

“Just call me if you have any problems. Actually, you had better email me. I’ve had enough with phones for a little while.”

John waved Paul over after the technicians had left. He wanted to start work at the next stage of construction straightaway. While Quartet had finished early, he knew things could easily fall behind.

Paul was surprised by their progress.

“Already? I’ll have to make some calls. I wasn’t expecting the phones to be finished until late this afternoon…”