Straight answer up front: sometimes my entire ten hour shift has less than 10 minutes of work in it.

I must confess, my job is a bit of an edge case because not everybody wants to do it.

I work third shift, and usually exclusively the weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights, 11pm to 9am).

4 ten-hour shifts.

and during these shifts… bruh most of the time I’m chilling

I’m reading ebooks, I’m watching anime or youtube, I’m chatting with friends on discord

most of my job is having a pulse while babysitting an empty building.

the part of my job that makes the money, though, is when the phone rings.

I work at a towing company, and I dispatch.
When people are calling me, it’s almost exclusively because shit’s fucked up.
I am in charge of sending some unfuckery their way.

Most of the calls are from companies though: Motor freight lines like Ryder, Penske, Fleetnet, UPS, FedEx, and a few other carriers that are even less customer-facing; motor clubs like Swoop, Urgent.ly, AAA, NationSafe; or insurance companies like Allstate or GEICO.

What they want to hear is how soon and how much and knowing how to rapidly generate this information while remaining accurate is where most of the expertise lies.

Then there’s the police calls.
When there has been an accident and a disabled vehicle (and its pieces) must be removed from obstructing the roadway, that’s us.
When some dumb bastard drives drunk and subsequently gets rightly caught, we impound their shit.
When a stolen vehicle is found, we recover it.

Whilst my opinion regarding cops (pigs) has evolved (fuck the police) quite a bit (they’re fucking bastards) in recent years (every last one of them), my guys do the NOT Standing On Someone’s Neck bits of it AFTER the dust has settled and the blood is done being spilled (and the bullets have stopped flying…) so generally we’re one of the responders on the make-someone’s-life-LESS-horrible side of the curve. Which feels pretty nice.

There are the rare occasions where a major shitshow evolves and I’m triaging calls and coordinating multiple assets in the field though, and that’s when the pay really feels worth it.

Presently I’m 5 years in and making 20/hr

Literally at this very second, it’s a wednesday night/thursday morning and I’ve already DONE my 40 hours this week - I’m here on overtime covering the other third shift dispatcher while they’re out, and each of these hours is worth $$$THIRTY BUCKS HELL YEAAAA$$$

it’s not enough to afford rent nowadays of course, but eh, i inherited the house from my father…
(and want to transform it into a group home for low income persons and families if I can get it organized right)
(i’ll be taking a page from history and trying to turn my house into something like a multigenerational compound except for people who aren’t strictly related by blood)