Forcing myself to stay up later and later the past few day plus a nice hour long nap before I had to go to work seems to have helped immensely. That and not having had to work five days in a row before switching shifts.
I gargled down a couple of cups of shitty coffee after I got there and started in.
Nothing too hard and the nice part about this shift is that I don’t have anyone running around with their hair on fire telling me to hurry up.
There weren’t any specific tasks waiting so I started in on some stuff that I know has been getting ignored and just went at it steady.
Midnight came and went and I was still just motoring along.
As long as I stay moving it ain’t so bad.
The dreaded hour before quitting time wasn’t even that bad and I wasn’t driving on auto pilot on the way home.
We shall see how tonight goes though. I have to be back for another ten hour shift in about 11 and 1/4 hours from now.
I see another nap in my future.
No autopilot is good to read, only a few more days.
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Pace yourself. Glad it was smooth.
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Autopilot… Ranger School (before I dropped out LOL) did something like 3 hours of sleep per 24 as per regulations… BUT: The catch was it was in 5-10 minute increments. Each evolution kept getting longer and weirder… guys talking to trees… I personally saw a Bigfoot. Deep in the heart of the Georgia woodline shit got strange with no sleep. Lay in a “Ranger 360” all dudes in a wagon wheel on the ground, rifles pointed out in a 360, hear a dude start to snore, just in time to have a RI (Ranger Instructor) walk over and ask “Who’dafuck is sleeping on Patrol?” Wake up, hump another 10 kilometers, wash rinse repeat… I lasted almost 4 weeks before I was done. That was at 24 and in the best young-stud shape of my life… damned near kill’t me
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I remember pulling some TDY over at Fort Bragg from Fort McClellen and having conversations and interactions with those Ranger padawans and you are right, weird ass shit and sleep deprived hallucinations…
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Was this the shift you were working alone? A Life-Line granny button is in your future. At least if you fall or get hurt and can’t reach your tools, you can summon the paramedics….
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One of the most civilized practices ever developed is the siesta. I’ve become very fond of mine. It’s taken some practice to get good at fading out quickly and getting going again when I get up, but it gets easier all the time.
Like your trucker commenter on another post, that hour or two before dawn is the worst. My few months at graveyard were horrible, almost nauseous with that fadeout. Once I got past that is wasn’t bad at end of shift, but as I said earlier, the rest of my life just ground down to nothing.
Back when I was a runner, I used to complain as I got into my forties and fifties that the big problem with distance running was the time it took–because the nap afterward was no longer optional.
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