The third shift starts when the second one ends.
For a growing number of people, a full-time job is the thing they do before the other job.
Andre Beaumont clocks out of a hospital supply warehouse at 6:15 and is in his car by 6:20, and by 6:40 the app has decided where he is going. He does this four nights a week, usually until eleven, occasionally until one if the numbers are good.
He has done the math more carefully than anyone would like. After gas, after the tires he replaces every fourteen months instead of every three years, after the fraction of the car's value that each shift quietly removes, it comes to something between nine and fourteen dollars an hour. He knows this. He does it anyway, because the range between nine and fourteen dollars an hour, multiplied by sixteen hours a week, is the difference between his household clearing the month and not.
The word "side hustle" does a lot of work here, and most of it is flattering. It suggests entrepreneurship, optionality, a little garnish on a stable meal. What Andre describes is closer to a second full-time schedule with none of the second full-time protections.
The arrangement is not new — people have always taken second jobs — but the texture is. A second job used to have a manager who knew your name and a shift that existed on a printed schedule. This one has a screen that offers work in three-minute increments and withdraws it without explanation.
"The part that gets me," he said, at a light, "is I can't tell if I'm working hard or being worked. Some nights it's the same feeling."
He is saving for a specific thing, which he asked us not to print, and which he described as boring and small and about eleven months away. He knows the exact number. He recites it the way other people recite a phone number they've had since childhood.
“"It's not extra money," he said. "It's the money. The other job is the part that has insurance."”
Otherwise Ordinary publishes original fiction and invented reporting. Names, places and businesses in this piece are made up.
