Imagine working at a restaurant that is very short staffed, but you’re not allowed to leave until your relief person for the next shift shows up. What would you do if you had been working all night but your relief person never showed up in the morning? Would you make some calls to find out why they weren’t there, clock out even though it’s against the rules, or keep working?

In this story, one teenager was in this situation and simply kept working and kept working. It’s simply incredible how long he was able to keep working. Thankfully, someone did finally come in to relieve him, but he had worked multiple shifts in a row at that point.

Keep reading for all the details.

Supervisor Handoff

So this was around 17 years ago. I was an overnight supervisor at a Steak n Shake in Florida, making 9 bucks an hour to essentially supervise myself doing all positions in the kitchen at the same time, while our one server handled everything in the dining room.

One of the policies of the store was that no supervisor or manager could leave until their relief manager showed up.

I come to work on a Tuesday night, for a shift that goes from around 10pm to 8am. Do the normal thing and my relief manager doesn’t show up.

So I just… stayed.

This is the shift that never ends!

Breakfast shift comes in, I continue to operate in the capacity I am in.

I’m 19 at the time and have some kind of sleep disorder that allows me to run on very little sleep, so I just roll with it.

The breakfast manager never showed up, and the GM didn’t bother coming in that day.

10pm rolls around again, which would have been the start of my shift all over again, so I’m still stuck there.

Yikes! How long will this continue?

At this point, I have dragged a stool from the backroom to the kitchen so I can rest my feet, but I am otherwise attentive and continue to process orders in a timely fashion.

Shift #2 draws to a close.

GM was scheduled to come in for that morning, flaked on it.

Now I’m on my second day straight being in this building, and no relief comes.

Finally, the shift ended.

We’re back to my shift again. I’m some weird combination of exhausted and livid.

8am rolls around again (for the third time), and my GM comes in as the breakfast relief manager.

I can only imagine I looked horrible, but he somehow found it in him to complain that the sourdough bread wasn’t stocked.

Told him it was stocked 2 days ago, clocked out, and slept in my car in the adjoining Walmart parking lot because I didn’t trust myself on the road.

At least the paycheck was good!

The rest of the week played out as normal.

Cue later on in that week, the AGM pulls me into the back office to have a talk with me. She was going over payroll and was deeply confused as to how my 9 dollars an hour self outearned *everyone* this week.

I explain working 2 days straight will do that, and how I didn’t have a choice given the policy.

To her credit, she wasn’t angry but astonished. It was a rather glorious paycheck to my teenaged self.

I’m astonished as well! I don’t know how he managed to work more than 2 days straight. If I read that correctly, it was night shift, day shift, night shift, day shift, plus one more night shift, so that’s like 60 hours or something crazy.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who just let clients complain after her boss refused to approve overtime.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Yes, I’m glad he didn’t drive home.

This person would’ve left.

At least he got paid overtime!

A former manager weighs in.

That was an insanely long time to work. I can’t even imagine. I would’ve fallen asleep before making it that long. It’s especially impressive if he was still alert and didn’t mess up any orders.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who rejects a low contract offer and leaves the company instead.