Working on the Weekend

It's the sabbath, and today I'll spend part of the day at work.  Of course, I'd rather observe today as a day of rest, but it hasn't worked out that way this week.  It's not all that bad (sabbath wise) as I won't be going in to work until 8pm, so I can still get in the important things like church and the Sunday Afternoon Nap.  The nap is particularly important, as I'll be staying up all night babysitting a furnace, because that's part of life doing R&D on a process that takes multiple days.

We could pretend that this is going to be some weighty discussion of the balance between keeping the sabbath day holy and dealing with the realities of employment, but it's not.  Really, my whole purpose here is to get to the story of the last time I had to work on Sunday.  It's been about 14 years since I got my paychecks from the most anti-sabbath employer of them all: BYU.

I spent a year at BYU washing dishes in the Morris Center, which fed all the residents of Deseret Towers, you know, back when that still existed.  (DT is gone, but I believe the Morris Center is still there.)  As those DTers still needed to eat on Sunday (man cannot live on vending services alone) we were obliged to put in some 4th-commandment-breaking hours.  The dishroom scheduling policy seemed to have the motto that once you've broken the sabbath, you might as well go all out, so when you were scheduled on a Sunday, you worked pretty much all day.  As I recall, once a month or so I have to skip out of church early to head over there and deal with the onslaught of DT eaters.  We'd be minimally staffed, and the hours were limited a bit which guaranteed a steady flow of work hour after hour.  On the upside, I think the students were all a little nicer on Sunday, and we probably had an increase in nice notes that would come down our little conveyor belt thanking us for our efforts.

So, there you have it.  Working on Sunday, even at the "Lord's University".  Ah, the crazy things you do in college.