Today Is Really, Really Going to Suck

Let me tell you about the asinine work schedule I'm on. Typically, it goes like this: I work four ten-hour shifts, from noon to ten P.M. I then have three days off (actually, a little more than three and a half days). Then I work another four ten-hour shifts, from ten P.M. to 8 A.M. Then I have three days off (or, actually, a bit less than two and a half days), and come back in on the noon-ten shift again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Unless you have actually done this, it is difficult to describe just exactly how much it sucks. It's not the shifts themselves, it's the transitions between them. Going from days/evenings to nights isn't that bad; I just stay up a few hours later each night on my weekend to get myself set up for the night shift. That's not terribly difficult, in fact, it's natural to rotate in a forward direction like that (particularly if you're a night owl like me).

It's the shift from nights back onto days that's nasty. Instead of rotating forward, I have to rotate backwards by at least five or six hours. That means making myself go to bed earlier, and that's hard. The only way to do it is to force myself to get up before I've had enough sleep so that I'll get tired earlier, and even that often doesn't work very well. I've been on this rotation for something like two years now, and I swear, every time I have to go from nights back to days, it seems to get harder.

Due to an odd quirk in the schedule -- the details are kind of complicated and boring, so I'm not going to get into them -- I've, unusually, actually been on nights now for two weeks in a row (though working different days of the week this week than last week). Now, that's a good thing: I like keeping the same shift two weeks at a time, and I like nights. But now I've got to switch off of it again, and since my system's had two weeks to settle into the night shift (which is where it seems to want to be anyway), it's even harder to make the change.

Which is why I'm doing something this weekend that I normally try to avoid: I'm just staying up all damned day. There's just no way I can force myself to go to sleep before about 8 AM. I've tried; it doesn't work. So I'm going to rotate an entire day forward instead of trying to rotate those six hours or so backwards.

I got up at about 6 PM on Friday. It's now nearly 7:00 AM on Saturday, and my body is starting to get to the point where it's thinking that bedtime should be coming up here in an hour or two. I'm going to try very hard to ignore it, though, and with a little luck and a whole lotta willpower, I might make it until 7 or 8 PM before I crash. Which theoretically means that I'll be waking up at some ungodly early hour on Sunday, which means I'll be able to get to sleep at a reasonable hour Sunday night, which means I'll actually be not just up but actually awake when I have to go to work at the crack of noon on Monday.

Which also means that today is going to really, really suck. Because I just do not function when I haven't had any sleep. I can't think, I can't concentrate, I have no energy, I'm just generally utterly useless as a human being. So the plan is to do some laundry (because you don't need either brainpower or energy to do laundry) and then sit around for most of the day watching the most mindless-yet-stimulating videos I can find. (Hmm, I picked up The Mummy a while back and never did get around to watching it. That should fit the bill perfectly.)

As to why I'm ranting about all this here, I don't know, except that a) I enjoy ranting, and b) it allows me to entertain the illusion that there might be someone out there feeling sorry for me. Plus, if I happen to send you any e-mail today and it turns out to be completely incoherent, well, now you'll know why.

The good news is that, if all goes well, we should be abandoning this ridiculous rotation very, very soon in favor of something that works a lot better. Keep your fingers crossed for me and hope that all goes well, because I've only got so many mindless videotapes in my collection and you really don't want me trying to drive to the video store when I'm sleep-deprived...