Law Students

Things I Hate: Working Nights

By Pete

Since the middle of July I’ve been working the most ridiculous schedule. I am working twelve-hour shifts, four days on, four days off. Yes, an eight-day work week. I started on a Monday. The next week I worked Tuesday-Friday. As the quicker among you have deduced: this means that several weeks after that, I had to work Friday-Monday.

Oh, yeah: those shifts? They start at 7:00. PM.

This essentially means that my weeks are completely messed up, and even when I’m off on the same days as the people I know, I’m sleeping bizarre hours.

The only “good” thing about this¹, is that it’s temporary. If the latest rumblings are to be believed, I’ve only got four more days on (and then four off) before I return to a normal-person schedule.

I’m not going to lie: if it hadn’t taken me months to find this job, and if I hadn’t depleted most of my savings to do it, and if I thought I could quickly find another, I’d have walked the day they announced these shifts. They are every bit as bad as I thought they would be (worse in some ways), and I really have no idea how the guys that normally work this shift actually do it.

Bitching aside, it has provided one interesting endurance test. Last weekend was the AFDC ultimate frisbee summer league end of season tournament. The way the schedule worked out, I had to work Friday and Saturday nights. Fortunately, getting off work at 7:00am gave me plenty of time to get out to the fields. My schedule went something like this:

• Friday, 2:00pm-6:30pm: Wake up, get ready for work
• Friday, 7:00pm-7:00am: Work. Fun times.
• Saturday, 7:00am-8:30am: Leave work, go home, get ready for Ultimate
• Saturday, 8:30am-4:30pm: Drive out to the fields, play ulty all day, drive home
• Saturday, 4:30pm-6:30pm: Shower, 45 minute nap, get ready for work
• Saturday, 7:00pm-7:00am: Work! More fun times!
• Sunday, 7:00am-8:30am: Leave work, go home, get ready for ultimate
• Sunday, 8:30am-4:00pm: Drive out to the fields, play/watch ulty all day, drive home
• Sunday, 4:00pm-6:00pm: Shower, change, get ready for an Alumni meeting
• Sunday, 6:30pm-9:00pm: ‘Bama alumni board meeting

When I got home from the board meeting, I was a little tired. Somehow, not really sleepy, though, so I stayed up until midnight before I finally decided I should go to bed because at that point I wasn’t really sure if I wasn’t tired or if I was just running on the inertia of being awake for so long. Also, several people told me (via IM) that I was “acting tired”, whatever that means.

I probably got another 30-45 minutes of sleep spread out in there between cat naps at work while waiting for things to transfer and sleeping at the fields a little on Saturday. So over the course of 58ish hours, I slept for 90 minutes.

How I can do that, but I can’t drag my ass out of bed before 8:00am without an act of congress I have no idea.

1. Mitigation of “bad” is “good”, right?

Full post as published by PeteHoliday.com on August 17, 2009 (boomark / email).