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At around the time that the GPO was morphing into BT, the son of my sales manager was a senior technician for them, and was responsible for teams installing BT cabling into new high rise buildings, both flats and commercial buildings.
Whenever they started a new job, the management would give them a target completion date taking into consideration that the teams would work on shift patterns, working 12 hours on and 12 hours off, 7 days a week.
The only problem was that the day team would complete the night shift's work, which meant that the night lot could stay tucked up in their beds at home during each job. And each member of the team would take it turn to sleep in the van on the site during the installation, and the day and night teams used to swap shifts so that the all did their bit.
And it's not that their managers didn't know what was going on, as they had all risen through the ranks themselves. It was just the way that they did things then, like when the managers would go around the engineers towards the end of the year to find out what dates they wanted to book as "sick days" so that they all used up the "allocation".
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