It could be both a phrase and a real aspect of your work. I see you're keeping it unclear. Much telling me thinks
i've worked a lot of odd hours, but never fast food with its crap shoot hours. one of my favorites when i was young enough to do it, was 12 hours a day for four days and 3 days off. that was all summer on a mineral/core sample drill, out in the nevada outback. two shifts of two persons each. one shift noon to midnight, the other midnight to noon, if i recall correctly. or it might have been 8 to 8. i just remember joining in with the coyote chorus when filling the water truck and looking up at all those billions of stars where there was no ground light to obscure any of them. sorry to say i've never lived any place where monkeys and mastodons weren't already extinct. (wolves in theory were too, but that one's not quite that simple, and the griz are long gone but the little bears and puma happily haven't gone away. though now of course there's too many humans for anything to be safe anywhere)