The Overnight
A few weeks ago I was asked to exchange my five-day-a-week/eight hour shift for a three-day-a-week/twelve hour shift. The three days are on the weekend and they are during the overnight whereas my old schedule was from 3 PM to 11 PM during the week. That’s not me in the picture below but an incredible simulation.
It’s not bad, though. My commute is a long one and doing it three days a week instead of five is alright. And seventy-five percent of the shifts I’m working are slow as hell. We’re lucky if we receive three emails during the overnight hours. (I won’t get into what I do because that’s another story altogether.)
Early in the shift I was drifting away. My head was bobbing like a broken bobble head doll. But I recovered and I’ve been okay ever since.
This might be a permanent gig for me. It would give me four days to pursue my real passions. I’m jamming a five day work week into three in order to have four days to stay in my neck of the woods and do whatever I want. And what I want is self improvement. I haven’t put a lot of effort into that in recent years and it shows. The blood tests came back last week and I’m a heart attack waiting to happen. “Gotta make some changes,” the girlfriend said. I agree.
I never thought I’d live past fifty years of age. My father died at thirty-seven and my mother at forty-nine. Now I’m worried that I’ll live into my hundreds and feel like shit because I ate a gazillion strips of bacon for fifty years. I’ll sit there drooling and wondering who the hell the people around me are. Occasionally I’ll shout, “Kill me!” but they’ll roll their eyes and tell me to kindly shut the hell up because others are trying to sleep.
