Working a night shift has been a most interesting experience in body & mind hacking.
My circadian rhythm has totally adjusted – however it stills feels odd to go to bed after sunrise, and wake up just before sunset. We picked the night shift as I needed to be at least available to my regular clients during normal business hours (I can at least check e-mail and receive calls if I’m awakened… whereas I can’t even take a cell phone into Amazon.com). And, because we were coming directly from California and still mentally on PST, we figured the night shift would be easier to adapt to than the evil get up at 4am to work a day shift option.
Our shift starts at 5pm and we’re now getting off at 5:30am the next morning. Amazon has us on 5 12-hr days this week (however, we’re opting for four 12 hrs days and two 6 hr days which amazingly feels like more time off to us) – the final push to Santapalooza. We stay up until 8 or 10am after watching a sunrise (and usually to the sounds of gunfire of nearby deer hunters – deer which greet us in the dark as we enter our campsite earlier in the evening.. er.. morning ), sleep until 2 or 3pm. Rinse. Repeat.
On many days I’ll squeeze in my work and online life into the hours of 2-4 pm (even later on our evenings off). Which I have to keep reminding myself when I get home the next evening.. err… morning.. after working a night shift, that while a ‘day’ has transpired for me since sending an e-mail – that for most folks, they’ve been mostly asleep and likely not even read my e-mail yet, let alone had time to act and respond.
Meals are odd. We have dinner food for our wake up meal, a lunch break at 11pm and then sometimes beer & donuts for our ‘dinner’ when we get home. Only two options for food that early in the morning that don’t involve us cooking – donuts and McDonald’s breakfast.
How we reference days has been totally weird. Terms like ‘tomorrow’, ‘yesterday’ and ‘today’ generally require further explanation and clarification – because there are now two possible definitions available to us. Our experience of a ‘day’ traverses two calendar days to the rest of the day time working world.
And, I find myself hesitating when I refer to the first half of our shift (5p – 11p) as ‘this morning’ – which is a very natural thing to call the first part of the working day.
It’s really odd to experience just how culturally engrained and abstract the whole concept of time vocabulary really is.
It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes our bodies to adjust to going to bed earlier in the .. umm.. day, night, evening.. whatever.
It sounds familiar. On cruise ships, we learn to rename the days of the week. Sunday, Monday, etc. become useless as our time is structured around cruise cycles, so our “weeks” can be anywhere between 3 and 14 days. We name the days after the ports-of-call, such as “Istanbul Day” or “2nd Sea Day.” Time is officially written in 24-hour format, but many of the contract workers cling to am/pm, and we travel between time zones on a regular basis.
We can so totally relate. I am always clarifying what day and time I am referring to in conversations. Dinner has been a bit different for us though. Up until last week, I had been making meals on our days off to eat while we are working. Now I would rather rest than cook. And well, since the water lines are still frozen (sigh), I would rather not deal with dishes. Beer and donuts.. you two are a trip 🙂
.-= Hitekhomeless (jenn)´s last blog ..Who says eating cheap is eating crap? =-.
In the first couple of weeks I was being endeavorous and cooking up something just before going into work to eat at ‘lunch’ break. But these 12 hr days barely leave enough time for sleeping, showers and checking e-mail, never mind cooking and dishes. The last two weeks, the free meals two or three times a week at Amazon was a nice break from having to figure that out.. but they seem to have quit that now. And yeah, ditto on dealing with frozen water lines.