I work for a large international department store chain at one of their head offices (greedy buggers have 2 head offices).

I work in I.T. and am an AS/400 Operator. I work in a team of seven, with a maximum of two of us being on shift at any one time. I say ’shift’ as we work a 24/7 365 day rota. There is always someone in our office.

We run, monitor and support systems batches and processes that run on a variety of different systems, the main one being an IBM mainframe called the AS/400.

Some people ask what I do for a living and then glaze over when I explain, so I found that the simplest way to describe it was the following …. We sit infront of lots of screens and when something beeps, we investigate and attempt to fix it. It’s really far more complex than that, but you don’t really need to know the ins and outs, right?

The job has a big perk in that we do lots of hours in a short space of time (just the way our rota works) and then end up with a week off every 2/3 weeks. I like my weeks off.