Pros
Good job to learn and grow. You learn a lot about Lubrizol's business quickly. A majority of the shifts are normal but 3 to 5 months out of the year we would be scheduled to work the 24x7 shifts. There are two shifts starting on Thursday and ending on Wednesday. Essentially you work one night shift and one day shift over a 21 day period with 7 days off in-between. You either have 4 or 5 days off at the beginning or end of these shifts depending on if you were the day or night person. The shifts would start at either 6 AM on Thursday morning or 6 PM on Thursday night. The day person and the night person would work together to turnover incidents, requests and computer builds. This scheduling allowed for a lot of time off. I used the time well taking vacations but a lot of the group didn't do a lot with the time off.
Cons
12 hour shifts were rough and borderline inhumane. Because contractors are paid weekly, there is actually very little overtime pay involved in working what amounts to 72 hours in a 7 day span. It really should probably be illegal but because of the time off in-between everyone grins and bears it. The Service Desk was understaffed and stressful. It is an extremely high turnover environment. Contractors are expendable and not treated as well at the FTE's. Lubrizol enjoys the freedom and flexibility of employing a lot of contractors in IT so that the can end contracts rather than laying off employees. Because of this, they make it extremely hard to get hired on as a FTE. Even if you are lucky enough to make it off the Service Desk into another position, that doesn't necesarilty mean you will be hired on full-time.