Musings on night shift, I’m sure most of you can relate
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you can’t walk into the department to start a night shift without saying ‘morning!’
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anyone who has worked with you the previous night will ask how you slept. This in turn illicits a response which involves exactly what time you got to sleep, what time you woke up needing to pee, how long you lay there pretending you didn’t need to pee before actually getting up, how long it took to get back to sleep, and what time you got up for good. They in turn will relate their shitty day of sleep back to you which usually involves a noisy child/pet/neighbour. Is it just me or does this level of detail never creep into an answer to the same question on day shift
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we are obsessed…and I mean truely obsessed…with knowing the following information: how many nights are you working? What number night shift is this? When are you back after finishing nights? How have your nights been? And if it’s the first night, what time did you get up and have you napped?
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we are also rediculously obsessed with what colleagues have brought to eat even though in actual fact it won’t matter because someone will plonk down communal snakes/chips/biscuits which will become everyone’s dinner
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there’s either people saying ‘omg it’s 5am! I can’t believe it! The nights flown’ or ‘I can’t believe it’s only 5am, I wanna die’
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during the last 30mins of the shift this weird excited feeling creeps up on you as you smell those freshly washed and deodorised day shifters wafting up the corridor gently replacing the night shift odours of sweat, stale coffee and assorted body fluids
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if you see any member of staff leaving the building early at the end of their shift as you are entering to start the night you have to say ‘well that’s a good sign’ cause that is the law!
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when you have finished your run of nights you have to tell absolutely everyone how many days you have off before you return, and the age old debate of how long to sleep after that last night and what if you don’t go to bed at all or sleep too long and spend your first night off wide awake?? The battle is real
Night shift…no place for wimps