10. Isolation. I used to be a pretty well-liked guy. I'm pretty fun once you get to know me. Now I can count the number of people who ask me to hang with them on one hand and still have most of my fingers unused. The only people who talk to me are prostitutes who want my cigarettes. Now that I quit smoking, I'll be a fucking hermit.
9. Sex. If you're in a committed relationship, sex becomes quite a challenge. Your partner will inevitably get randy during two specific times of the day - right before you wake up, and right before you go to work (or if those two things happen at the same time, only at that time). And unless you want it to burn when you pee, don't let #10 give you any ideas.
8. Food. You never get used to eating at different times from the rest of the world. As much as it would seem to be a simple mathematical problem of counting hours, you just never know when you should eat what meal.
7. Confusion. People just don't. Fucking. GET IT. People will make you feel guilty for not being able to hang out with them, not getting back to them as soon as they would like, not being able to help them at 10 am because it's too close to your bedtime. It doesn't matter how long you do it. It doesn't matter how long those people have known you while you've worked this shift. They will never bend to your schedule, and they will never forgive you for not bending to theirs. Which contributes to #10 quite a bit.
6. Explanations. You have to constantly explain to people why you can't do what you can't do, why you have to do what you do when you do it, why you eat what you eat when you eat it. Again, it doesn't matter how long these people have known you. People who have known me for the entire four years I've worked the overnight shift, in fact people who only met me after I had the shift, still need me to explain to them the incredibly complicated concept of time. No, I don't want pasta at 8 pm, I just fucking woke up. Yes, I am eating burritos at 7 am, it's my fucking dinner. No, I can't go see the doctor at 3pm. I won't be awake.
5. Co-workers. The people who can loosely be defined as your co-workers, only because you all get your paychecks from the same people, are just as oblivious of you as everyone else. Even though your life and theirs wouldn't even have anything to do with one another unless you worked the overnight shift, they still don't get it. They schedule mandatory meetings at 1 pm. Since you don't know who the hell anyone is, you will occasionally have to e-mail your boss and ask "Who is this? They asked me to make/give them something." Your boss will respond "His desk is right next to this other person's desk," which doesn't fucking help at all because you don't know who the other person is either. Because of this, whenever someone does something bad at work, unless the culprit is immediately caught, you are automatically the prime suspect. No one will ever be able to prove you did it, and no one will ever be completely convinced you didn't do it, because there's no one around to attest to either.
4. Fridays. Trying to explain or figure out what happened on what day is always an ass-pain because you're just as confused as everyone else. You come home from work, go to sleep, wake up, and go back to work on what's technically the same day, but to you it's the next day. This becomes particularly frustrating at the end of the week. When people begin milling into the building on Friday morning, they'll say things like "Happy Friday!" and "Thank God it's Friday!" and "Have a good weekend!" But it isn't Friday to you. Friday's tonight and tomorrow morning. It's still your Thursday.
3. Appointments. You know how hard it can be to get an appointment with some doctors unless you're willing to wait 4 months? Imagine how tough it would be if the window of time you have during the rest of the world's waking hours is something around 1 or 2 hours.
2. Ignorance. You are almost always forgotten by your workplace. When important updates to your job come up, you'll be lucky if anyone bothers to tell you. But you'll still be responsible for obtaining the information you never knew existed.
1. Crimefighting. The only cool overnight job is super-hero. At least they get to fight crime and save the world. I have to listen to the BBC. And jazz. And people who play banjos.
2 comments:
Happily, that's all over! Now you'll get to find out who so-and-so is and where their desk is, and then you're going to wish you hadn't known, because it's covered in troll dolls and so-and-so looks like one too.
#5 also applies for weekend people.
"Who left these dishes in the sink? Must be the weekend board ops! Off with their heads!!"
"Who filled up the garbage can near the microwave making it an unsightly mess on Monday? Certainly not the news hosts, their guests or the combination there of. No no no. Weekend board ops. Off with their heads!"
Post a Comment