What the hell?

[mousme]

I'm going to talk more about working night shift, because it's all I'm doing lately and it's eating what's left of my brain.

Another new and exciting facet of working night shift is that it sticks me in this weird limbo where I feel all energetic around 03:00 (so, right about now), and I start thinking up projects in my head. I have about five or six projects lurking at the back of my mind. So I think to myself: "Cool! I have all this energy and all these projects, I can probably get started on them later today!"

For instance, I want to do a major purge of all the extraneous stuff I have in the apartment before I move. That way, I will spare myself having to pack a whole bunch of stuff that I don't ever use.

I have laundry to do, and floors to wash (yes, even using the Scooba, I still have some prep work to do), and cooking and baking projects. Cooking and baking means I need to stop by a grocery store, etc.

I get all revved up about all this, which keeps me going until, oh, about 05:30 or even 06:00. Then I start getting a bit tired, since my shift is nearly over. By the time 06:30 rolls around, I'm ready to go home and pass out.

Then I think to myself: "But what about all my projects?"

Myself answers: "It's 06:30. You can't go to the grocery store because it's closed. If you do laundry now, you need to stay awake for the entire cycle, so you can then hang it outside to dry. Multiply that by three loads of laundry, and you'll have been up all morning. When exactly were you planning on sleeping?"

So I generally get to bed somewhere around 07:30 or 08:00 at the very latest. Sometimes if I have a really important errand I'll get up at 14:00 to run it, but I don't usually have the energy for more than that. So I go home and go back to bed. Today, since I had a couple of errands to run, I split my "night" in half, and ended up sleeping from 08:30 (I had trouble getting to sleep this morning) to 13:30, and then from 16:00 to 20:00. I left for work at 21:30. Can we see where this leaves me no time for the aforementioned shiny projects?

Now, the rational part of me knows that I have no energy for anything except sleeping and working when I'm on night shift, and especially not when I'm working night shift *and* overtime. Right now, I'm working fourteen days straight, for a total of 128 hours. This will all be over next Monday, when I'll be on holiday for a little less than a week. The rational part of me reassures me that it's not the end of the world that my laundry isn't done, that the floors aren't clean, that the cat pans need more attention than I'm currently giving them, and that I have six unattended projects in the works. The rational part of me is being very forgiving.

The irrational side of my brain is pitching several screaming, kicking fits every day. It yells that I'm going to be moving soon (never mind that it's going to be a *minimum* of six to eight weeks before that happens under the best of circumstances), that nothing's being done, that I'm wasting all my daylight hours by sleeping, and that I'm frittering away the entier summer ZOMG. Yeah. Did I mention irrational?

I'm just glad this is going to be over soon. I think anything more than two solid weeks of night shift might just drive me round the proverbial bend.

Comments

[bodhifox.livejournal.com]

You could do like me and operate on 3 to 4 hours sleep? I've been doing that for a year and a half.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Can't do it. Did it in my early twenties (well, not so much 3-4 hours of sleep as 0-1 hours of sleep). Had a breakdown, stopped sleeping entirely, had a further breakdown. Had a mild psychotic episode. Alienated all my friends, all my family, destroyed my finances. Was non-functional for about a year, and took four friggin' years to recover.

So, no. Not going to do it. No way, no how.

But thanks for the suggestion: I know it was well intended. I just had to explain why, in my case, it's a bad idea. :)

[bodhifox.livejournal.com]

Gods Phnee, I was commiserating and joking, not suggesting. According to calculations I've shaved a few years off my potential lifespan by not getting enough sleep now. I may not be able to deliver milk from my horse drawn wagon until I'm 80. ;) Just take care of yourself. I have no choice but to be up with Bear and Sparky.

[forthright.livejournal.com]

To what extent if any are you able to turn down overtime at this point? Because seriously, this can't be healthy. Is this the sort of thing that is expected of everyone or just of newer employees?

[mousme.livejournal.com]

The irony is, I *have* turned down a fair amount of overtime. We are *seriouslY* short-staffed. We are short about five people out of twenty, to give you an idea. That's 1/4 of our shifts that aren't covered.

Mostly it's the newer employees who are getting most of the overtime, but that's because the older employees have more health problems and can't hack all the hours without getting sick themselves and compounding the problem.

We've just "lost" another employee who's been promoted to interim supervisor, so his shifts have to be covered too. So, yeah. I'm trying to keep the levels of overtime to a sane amount, but it's pretty hard when there's no one there to cover: we all end up paying for it in the end, one way or another.