Yes, yes, yes, I know I have nobody to blame but MOI for taking on an additional project at work. I'm logging in hours equivalent to a job and a half and although I'm way psyched about how well the project is going and I love my job and the people I work with -- I'm still FREAKIN' TIRED!
I've been fighting to make sure I get my minimum 6 and a half hours of sleep every night but I'm starting to feel un poquito cranky and that worries me.
In the 80s I was one of the Barbarians at the Gate, well, no, I was one of the support personnel helping them pillage their way through corporate America. Which is just a flowery way of saying that I worked in the Word Processing center at Merrill Lynch's Investment Banking Division on the night shift. I was young, I was hungry, and was making $25 an hour on the shift and $37.50 in overtime.
We would do whatever it took to get those overtime assignments, too, believe me! The Saturday and Sunday overtime shifts were from 10 to 10, so if you got the whole weekend that was an extra 24 hours to add to your 37.5 weekly hours and if you pulled a double during that same week (e.g. worked from 4:00 p.m. until 8:00 a.m. the next day) you could do a 70 or 80 hour a week depending on how much abuse your body could take.
I was younger then...
We used to work all week, then on Fridays we'd work until the usual 8:00 a.m., sleep under the desk for two hours and get up at 10:00 a.m. and work until 10:00 p.m. that night. Then we'd go into the ladies room, change into our clubbing outfits, and go out dancing as a group, go home at 4:00 a.m., sleep for four hours, shower, dress and be back at our computers at 10:00 a.m. for another 12 hour shift.
Yet, we somehow managed to do really good work. There were a lot of talented people on the team. I ended up being business partners with two of them in a consulting firm, one of whom is still one of my best friends.
I used to also do consulting and training during the day -- teach legal word processing at a major law firm and then go to work that night. That was a bit brutal.
One time, I dozed off but kept on typing. The proofreader called me into her office which meant she had something she wanted to explain verbally instead of just returning a marked up copy. We listened to WBLS on the night shift -- rather bizarre to be typing banking documents while listening to the "Quiet Storm"!
The proofreader handed me my document and pointed to a section -- she was cracking up -- where I had typed in something like "And the fourth quarter results were I'm never, never gonna give you up, I'm never, ever gonna stop which reflects a healthy balance sheet although not the way I feel about you. Girl, I just can't live without you."
In my "sleep-typing" I had somehow managed to combine a financial analysis with Barry White lyrics!
My night shift experience was over after about two years (I think). One time I was sleeping and some neighbors that I was friends with were being really noisy in the backyard and woke me. I flung open the window and yelled out "You guys!? I was trying to sleep! Don't you know what TIME it is?" and they were, like, "Uh, yeah Judy, it's 2:00 o'clock in the afternoon."
That's when I knew it was time to get a day job. Literally.
Posted by: Donna | Jul 22, 2005 at 09:37 AM
Posted by: Sarah | Jul 19, 2005 at 10:18 PM