To Sleep Is An Act Of Faith
Somehow in the hours between my final grave shift and my first official swing shift a decision was made behind the scenes to not change the schedule. My week concludes with a “grave shift” meeting Wednesday morning and the parting words from my supervisor were something to the effect of “Oh, and we’re not going to change the schedule after all so you’ll just work your regular graves next week.”
That’s all I’m going to say about the work part of it because I risk dangerous territory if I start talking about how that makes me feel and what I think about the way the news was delivered so I’ll neatly sidestep that.
The truth is that my room to complain is narrow because I decided to be all accommodating and easy to get along with during the interview process to try and secure a position at the company. Even since then I’ve exuded this air of nonchalance when questions of scheduling come up. Specific instances of this have typically been followed by a mental self-berating rant but intentions aside, any evaluation of my external demeanor would give no indication of how badly I despise the shift I’m on.
Not that any shift would be much preferable. Day shifts involve making the long commute in heavy traffic, swing shifts clash harshly with Nik’s schedule so we completely—completely—miss each other for several days when I work those hours and then of course there is grave which has me sleeping vampire-style. Schedule-wise the only thing my job has going for it are the ten hour days which affords me enough weekend time to partially make up for the crummy schedules.
As it is I’ve been flip-flopping my schedule from the vampire-like to the regular prey human. This means that once I wake up on Tuesday evening I don’t go back to sleep until around 9:00 Wednesday night when Nik calls it a day. Then on Saturdays I wake up like a normal person at around eight or nine in the morning but then I have to go back to bed late in the afternoon to get enough sleep to carry me through until around noon on Sunday when I finally get home.
The problem with this is twofold: 1) I stay up for at least 24 hours at least once a week and 2) If I don’t get to sleep on Saturday evenings (which isn’t uncommon because I’m rarely all that tired then) it throws me off for the rest of the week. That’s not even taking into account how tweaked it is for me to be sleeping on Saturday afternoon when most people are hanging out or running errands that are harder to handle during the week. This week for instance I wasn’t able to get more than an hour’s sleep Saturday so I dragged through work all night, had a miserable drive home and arrived cranky and only interested in getting to bed.
I don’t really have a solution for any of this nor do I expect sympathy considering my very active role in er, making the bed in which I must now sleep (if ever there were an inappropriate cliche, that was it). I just thought I should complain a bit about it.
And see? I feel a little bit better. Still tired, but better.
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