aDrenais' Book of Shadows

It's the hour before dawn, when the night is darkest, when I spend my time surfing the blogs of all the people I love/know/hate (not in order of preference) while waiting for the 8am person to come in and take over the shift. Colleagues are right to point out that our weekend shifts are pointless time-wasting activities, but I quite cherish the opportunity to go through the e-mails and delete them with a sadistic thrill. In addition, working over the weekends means I get to work less weekdays, so that I really work only 3 days a week (weekdays) and come in to while my time away on weekends.

About my shiftwork. Colleagues and I rotate morning, afternoon and midnight shifts on a weekly basis. Friends have commented that that is way too often, and prevents any specialisation advantages from setting in. By the time we adjust ourselves to the difference in working hours and get used to the responsibilities associated with the particular shift, it's time to move on to the next one. We are therefore all "half buckets"; before the bucket can be filled completely the next shift beckons and half the water will slop over. I would love to be able to propose a more efficient way of planning our shifts to minimise rotations so that everybody will be less grumpy, but so far the only bright idea I've had is to stretch out our weekly rotations to fortnightly ones. On top of halving the acclimatization blues, staying longer in each shift will allow hopefully help the retention of information required to perform each shift competently, like muscle memory.

This deserves greater thought, at a later date when I'm not braindead from doing the midnight shift and surviving on less than 3 hours of sleep because of dance classes on both Saturday and Sunday. Only half an hour to go, tahan. Tahan.