As a supervisor, I experimented with 4x10 a number of years ago and found that it was a royal pain to sustain. There were about 15 people to schedule and we had to stay at operational levels each week day. That meant that the day you had off rotated and could be any day of the week. The trouble was that a lot of folks, when they had Tuesday or Thursday off, would ask to take a vacation day too (for a 4 day weekend) and that was tough to accommodate given the reduced staffing levels. We made an attempt to be fair, but I started getting a lot of griping about "so-and-so has had more Fridays or Mondays off than me". Additionally, I found that I had 3-4 people who would not hold up their end of the bargain. They would stretch 8 hours of work to fill 10 using the extra time at work for non-productive purposes. This caused conflict with the folks that were working hard. I decided to abandon the scheme at the end of the 9 month trial. Interesting note about human nature - everybody would remember that the scheme worked great for them while at the same time forget about all the times they would complain to me that they could not get their own work done because they were too busy filling in for someone who was gone that day.

-G