When the cat's away, the mice will...be more productive than usual?

My supervisor has been on vacation since monday, and it seems like the entire night staff in hematology has been working double time to get stuff done. It's nicer, because now, when we're finished our nightly "quotas" for work, we have to pretend to do stuff in order to look busy, which is a chore on it's own. On Monday, when we finished our work for the night, we just sat there and chatted, and didn't feel bad about it at all. It's kinda nice.

Last night, however, it was clear the night wasn't going to go as easily as most others. Apparently, the computers in the Data Entry department were down for a few hours in the afternoon, which slows down pretty much all things at the lab. By the time I arrive, usually, about 6500-7000 samples have been processed, so I would only have about 2000-3000 samples personally to work with. Since the computers were down, only about 4500 samples were done by the time I got there, leaving me to deal with approximately 5000. What frustrates me even more, is that the afternoon shift, knowing full well that they were behind schedule, still left some work behind to leave for me when I got there. When I showed up, about 10:55pm, they were still sitting at their stations, just chatting away. You know that you haven't been productive in a long time when you're chatting so long, you forget it's about time to clock out and go home. Fuckin' lazy sons of bitches couldn't finish off their work so I'd have slightly less to worry about. The worst part is, the afternoon shift has two people to do what I do all by myself in the night shift. They are probably just lazy first year university students who actually think the work they're doing is difficult. Assholes.