HAHBOW

A while back, I came up with the concept of what I call HAHBOW ("Hours Away from Home Because Of Work") as a way to compare the effects of various jobs on quality of life. In my current job, I work half the days for 12 1/2 hour shifts, plus one extra 2 hour meeting every two weeks. I have about a 30 minutes commute each way, so that means I'm away from home because of work about 98 hours every two weeks, or 49 hours a week. Not too bad...

I came up with this metric (of course, I didn't call it that) when I was a junior officer to try to explain to those outside the Navy how many hours we really had to work. At the time, on USS Topeka from '90-'93, I came up with the following weekly average "HAHBOW" numbers:
Topeka was a front line, operational SSN homeported in San Diego. As a result, we probably spent about 40% of our time at sea outside of deployments, and then deployed for six months every two years. As a junior officer, you normally stood duty about every four days; this meant you spent the night on the boat, and were therefore "away from home because of work". Normal workdays in port were about 0700-1600, with a 45 minute commute each way. Therefore, during the two year period:
HAHBOW deployment: 168 hr/week (25% of the time)
HAHBOW local ops: 168 hr/wk (0.4 x 75%=30% of the time)
HAHBOW inport: 80 hr/wk (20 workdays per month, of which 5 were duty days, plus two weekend duty days per month; 15 days x 10.5 hrs, 7 days x 24 hrs equals about 325 hours per month, or about 80 hours per week.)

Doing the math, this works out to 128 hours per week, on average, away from home for an average sea-going JO. (Enlisted nukes had about the same numbers; enlisted coners and more senior officers a little less -- coners were normally one more section duty than nukes). If you took a reasonable amount of leave, figure it worked out to 120 hours/week. That's quite a lot of time; it's a good thing we loved it so much... (ducks to avoid thrown objects)