CyberKnet's Journal: How many hours in a work week?

<RANT>
This is a rant. Sorry if you don't want to read it, or if you think I'm whining. Give it up, this is my journal.

1:00PM Friday I get a memo from a company VP noting that there was a database update scheduled this weekend that a colleague of mine was doing. No biggie. My colleague is (Deservedly) going out of town. No major issues yet.

In leu of this, myself and another colleague MUST perform the update. I might point out that my good friend who is going out of town got told he was doing this an hour before I got told I was. Now let me reiterate.. my buddy DESERVES this weekend off. He has worked probably eight weekends straight.

This update will commence *testing* at 7:30PM Friday, and finish testing around 3am saturday morning. The production run will commence midday saturday, and you can guess roughly how long that will take from the test.

There was no asking if we minded. There was no asking if we had plans. There was no asking ... period. This is the way this company operates; they get a an itch in their pants at a moments notice, and then it has to be taken care of. Immediately.

The VPs make the decisions, and to be honest, I really don't think that they have a clue about this stuff. They just decide that it has to be done.

I had to scrap all of my plans for this weekend. This is probably about three weekends out of five that they are doing this kind of thing. I work in excess of 55 hours a week, every week. And that is just on the weekdays. Then you get into the weekend work.

There is no compensation for this. There are no bonuses, there is no apology except from my immediate manager, and let's face it. This is not their fault. It is just expected, all the time, and to be honest, it's burning me out.

What can I do about this short of quit? I'm not knowledgeable enough about local laws (or clueful enough to decode them) to know if they are violating any with these kinds of hours.
</RANT>