Happy Hump Day...and the nightshift essay
Dear Blog,
Tuesday is an all-around crappy day. When you're done work on Tuesday, there is no feeling of, well, anything. On Monday, after work, you're like, "well, I've made it through the worst day." Wednesday is hump day, so when you're done Wednesday, you always know you have less of the week in front of you than you do behind. Thursday always means only one more day to go, and for many of us (myself included), it's also payday, when we reap the rewards of our work. And after Friday, of course, the weekend starts and you get to relax.
But Tuesday? Nothing special. As I write this, I still have the majority of the week separating me from the next two day rest period, and there's no feeling of accomplishment that follows getting through a Monday. It's just depressing.
I woke up yesterday around 1:00ish, which is a bit late for me (I usually wake up in the 10:30-12:00 vicinity, but 1:00 is not a completely unusual occurence). At 4 I went to the post office to mail the check for the excise tax on my car, and Dan's necklace, which his wife hand-made for him and also which he left at the bathroom of my cape house the weekend he came over.
Last night, we had spaghetti for dinner (another wonderfully easy meal to prepare for yourself; I put quite a bit of effort into it actually, although I don't yet make my own tomato sauce - but I do chop up fresh vegetables and meat and cook them before adding them to the sauce; it's a goal of mine over the next few months to start making my own sauce; you can really taste the difference the more you add to a recipie). We laughed at Scrubs, but not nearly as hard as we laughed at an on demand episode of CSI Miami that aired, I suppose last Monday. There is a particularly awful scene where David Caruso is driving around in a SUV that has a bomb in it to a remote location where it won't hurt anybody when it blows. He gets there with maybe 15 seconds left on the bomb, takes his sunglasses off, gets out of the car, immediately puts his sunglasses back on, and then walks, not runs, away from the vehicle, which explodes (in slow motion of course) while Caruso is having his mandatory Robert Duvall in Apocolypse Now moment, and then he says, I'm not making this up, "Burn, baby, burn." If you don't watch CSI Miami, then you are missing out. This has to be the most unintentionally funny show on the air (it might be the most funny show, period). David Caruso has got to be the world's biggest jackass, and watching him poison any scene he speaks in (which is practically every scene in the show) is comedy at its best. At one point we had to rewind a scene twice because I was laughing so hard at Caruso's overacting that I couldn't hear what the dude was saying who was talking to him.
Work was actually pretty easy today - I didn't even open up the water bottle I brought for the second half of my shift - but like I already said, Tuesday is the worst day because there is no feeling of accomplishment after you leave.
I wanted to write about working the overnight shift. When I tell people about my hours, they invariably grimace and wonder aloud how I can do it. Honestly, I like working overnight. I'm a bit of an owl already, and the hours are certainly convenient to anything else I would do - like taking classes next semester. I don't have to worry about my work schedule conflicting with anything, I just need to make sure I get my 6-9 hours of sleep every 24 hours (or so). Also, working the night shift makes you feel a bit closer to the people you work with. It's like the guy who originally gave us our tour told us, "it's not what we do, but when we do it, that binds us closer than any other shift."
And best of all, there is no traffic, to or from work. I live in downtown Lowell, as I mentioned earlier, and I can tell you, from 4:30 or so to about 6:30 there is no sense even getting on the roads to go anywhere, because you'll be sitting in traffic pretty much the entirety of the trip. I can't imagine anything I'd rather be doing less than that after work. Well, I can think of a few things, but they all would be a violation of the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause of the 8th Ammendmant to the US Constitution. Anyway, drive these same roads at 10:30 on a weekday night, then again at 3:00 in the morning (or later), and there ain't another car in sight.
The only problem is Friday nights, though. As overnight workers, our weekends start later than anyone else's (on the other hand, they end later, as well - we have all day Monday to recover from the damamge we may have done to ourselves Saturday and Sunday). But on the whole, that's an easy sacrifice to make. I mean, it's not like we don't get Saturday nights. And we can still go out on Friday night, we just have to be in by 10 and we can't get drunk. But as far as going to a resteraunt or a movie goes - why not?
No sir, you guys can keep your day jobs. I love working at night.
That's what I got this morning. When I get to my sports blog this afternoon, I'm gonna write a beauty of an essay on why the NBA did the right thing keeping 18-year olds out of the NBA Draft (I know, I know, couldn't be more timely, right?). As for the politics blog, I don't know what I'm gonna do yet. But with plenty to write about, I'm sure I'll have something interesting and more timely than the basketball essay to say.
Tuesday is an all-around crappy day. When you're done work on Tuesday, there is no feeling of, well, anything. On Monday, after work, you're like, "well, I've made it through the worst day." Wednesday is hump day, so when you're done Wednesday, you always know you have less of the week in front of you than you do behind. Thursday always means only one more day to go, and for many of us (myself included), it's also payday, when we reap the rewards of our work. And after Friday, of course, the weekend starts and you get to relax.
But Tuesday? Nothing special. As I write this, I still have the majority of the week separating me from the next two day rest period, and there's no feeling of accomplishment that follows getting through a Monday. It's just depressing.
I woke up yesterday around 1:00ish, which is a bit late for me (I usually wake up in the 10:30-12:00 vicinity, but 1:00 is not a completely unusual occurence). At 4 I went to the post office to mail the check for the excise tax on my car, and Dan's necklace, which his wife hand-made for him and also which he left at the bathroom of my cape house the weekend he came over.
Last night, we had spaghetti for dinner (another wonderfully easy meal to prepare for yourself; I put quite a bit of effort into it actually, although I don't yet make my own tomato sauce - but I do chop up fresh vegetables and meat and cook them before adding them to the sauce; it's a goal of mine over the next few months to start making my own sauce; you can really taste the difference the more you add to a recipie). We laughed at Scrubs, but not nearly as hard as we laughed at an on demand episode of CSI Miami that aired, I suppose last Monday. There is a particularly awful scene where David Caruso is driving around in a SUV that has a bomb in it to a remote location where it won't hurt anybody when it blows. He gets there with maybe 15 seconds left on the bomb, takes his sunglasses off, gets out of the car, immediately puts his sunglasses back on, and then walks, not runs, away from the vehicle, which explodes (in slow motion of course) while Caruso is having his mandatory Robert Duvall in Apocolypse Now moment, and then he says, I'm not making this up, "Burn, baby, burn." If you don't watch CSI Miami, then you are missing out. This has to be the most unintentionally funny show on the air (it might be the most funny show, period). David Caruso has got to be the world's biggest jackass, and watching him poison any scene he speaks in (which is practically every scene in the show) is comedy at its best. At one point we had to rewind a scene twice because I was laughing so hard at Caruso's overacting that I couldn't hear what the dude was saying who was talking to him.
Work was actually pretty easy today - I didn't even open up the water bottle I brought for the second half of my shift - but like I already said, Tuesday is the worst day because there is no feeling of accomplishment after you leave.
I wanted to write about working the overnight shift. When I tell people about my hours, they invariably grimace and wonder aloud how I can do it. Honestly, I like working overnight. I'm a bit of an owl already, and the hours are certainly convenient to anything else I would do - like taking classes next semester. I don't have to worry about my work schedule conflicting with anything, I just need to make sure I get my 6-9 hours of sleep every 24 hours (or so). Also, working the night shift makes you feel a bit closer to the people you work with. It's like the guy who originally gave us our tour told us, "it's not what we do, but when we do it, that binds us closer than any other shift."
And best of all, there is no traffic, to or from work. I live in downtown Lowell, as I mentioned earlier, and I can tell you, from 4:30 or so to about 6:30 there is no sense even getting on the roads to go anywhere, because you'll be sitting in traffic pretty much the entirety of the trip. I can't imagine anything I'd rather be doing less than that after work. Well, I can think of a few things, but they all would be a violation of the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause of the 8th Ammendmant to the US Constitution. Anyway, drive these same roads at 10:30 on a weekday night, then again at 3:00 in the morning (or later), and there ain't another car in sight.
The only problem is Friday nights, though. As overnight workers, our weekends start later than anyone else's (on the other hand, they end later, as well - we have all day Monday to recover from the damamge we may have done to ourselves Saturday and Sunday). But on the whole, that's an easy sacrifice to make. I mean, it's not like we don't get Saturday nights. And we can still go out on Friday night, we just have to be in by 10 and we can't get drunk. But as far as going to a resteraunt or a movie goes - why not?
No sir, you guys can keep your day jobs. I love working at night.
That's what I got this morning. When I get to my sports blog this afternoon, I'm gonna write a beauty of an essay on why the NBA did the right thing keeping 18-year olds out of the NBA Draft (I know, I know, couldn't be more timely, right?). As for the politics blog, I don't know what I'm gonna do yet. But with plenty to write about, I'm sure I'll have something interesting and more timely than the basketball essay to say.
posted by k - L - g | 4:12 AM
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