h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25812422
Night work 'throws body into chaos'

Having spent more than 12 years working anything from one to three nights a week, sometimes until only 2.00 or 3.00am, sometimes until 6.00 or 7.00, and on a few occasions until later. I will never, ever do nightwork again.

If you have to work until around 2am it's not too bad - it's just like having a late night out, but starting work at 11pm, when most of the people around you are getting ready for bed, and having to work an eight-hour shift is not fun. There are some who say they thrive on it, and maybe they do, or are telling themselves they do, but it's not natural, and there are always tales, which may or may not be apocryphal, of people who've worked for decades at Smithfields, Billingsgate, Covent Garden etc, but who keeled over and died within six months of retiring and having to adjust to a 'normal' sleeping pattern.

I have next to no body clock these days, which is great on the few occasions I travel because I either don't get, or I recover quickly from jet lag, but I also have terrible insomnia. I don't know for sure if that's a result of the nightwork I did; I've always been a light sleeper, but I never used to wake up at 5am or 6am (sometimes earlier) on a regular - almost daily - basis like I do today. I'm lucky to get four hours sleep some nights.

No, nightwork is not good for a person.

I've talked about the shift patterns I've worked in the past elsewhere here, but it's always worth the incredulous laugh that I get from repeating it...

In my early Army days we worked a 4-way shift:
Days (8am to 5pm)
nights (5pm to 8am)
sleep day (until 2pm - after that the military could get you to do PT and stuff although in reality it wasn't often the case)
Day off.

In order to get a weekend sometimes we worked a swing-shift weekend where we did nights on friday followed by, I think, days on Sunday. Which meant that when you were on the swing shift you did nights on Thursday and weren't back until days on Monday. Which was nice.

then our manning was cut and we worked
Days
Nights
Sleep day
days...
with no swing weekends or anything. In winter you were going to work in the dark, working in our (sneaky beaky) cellar all day and going home again in the dark. on a sleep day you were lucky to get 2 hours daylight (if you managed to drag your sorry backside out of bed before the sun went down again)

And on the short shift pattern, of course, you had to do military training, PT, admin and everything else on that one afternoon or before a night shift which meant that you almost never had time to do anything apart from work.

When I changed to the Intelligence Corps we had much weirder shifts.

days (1pm - 9pm)
split (7:30am - 1pm followed by 9pm - 7:30am)
sleep day
days
split
sleep day
day off

At some point the CO decided that all military training was to be done on a Friday. Which meant that the only time we could do it was if Friday was our day off (8am - 5pm usually, with beer at 5:30pm). Until the Regimental Sergeant Major took pity on us and moved all military training to Saturdays (it was only once a month or so). And we had a jolly good laugh at all the day-shift clerks and so on whining about how their day off was ruined.

As a result of those shift patterns and having been to boarding school where for 3 years I slept in dormitories of 20 girls, I have learned to sleep for short periods, long periods, with noise, without noise, with light and without light and any combination of those. Which is useful.

Whether or not I'm entirely right in the head may or may not have to do with the shifts...

I can't speak of this from own experience, but R travels to his childhood home, Hawaii, and back to Sweden, twice a year, for six weeks at the time.
His internal clock seems totally busted - it takes months for him to get approximately on the same schedule as the rest of my house, and even then he reads for a while in the wolf hours, and naps randomly during the days. Being retired allows, that, of course.

That would drive me potty The first time I came to the US was before I began the nightwork. I travelled from London to New York, and by 8pm NY time (3am in London) I couldn't keep my eyes open, then I woke up at around 3am (8am London time), but after that first night I was on NY time, both physically and mentally. Coming back was very different, and sometimes it still gets to me slightly, because travelling east is worse than travelling west. You really don't get much sleep on the redeye, and when you get back to the UK your body is saying it's the wee hours but it's actually breakfast time where you are now and you've got more than 12 hours to get through before it's bedtime. Do you try to stay awake and get through it or do you take a few hours in an attempt to at least get a little sleep, but not so much that you sleep through the day and then find yourself wide awake at bedtime

Sho - I used to work with someone who lived in a house next to a railway crossing and who said that she learned how to sleep through the noise they make. There are several of those in Austin, like this one http://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=30.230226,-97.775491&spn=0.003064,0.004128&t=h&z=19 You can see how many houses and apartment buildings there are next to it, in the vicinity, and for miles around, obviously. That line is almost exclusively used by freight trains, and they run 24 hours a day. Now, apart from the ding-ding-ding-ding of the crossing bell, the trains have to sound their horn while approaching the crossing and while going over it, not mention the almighty rumble that a passing freight train makes. You can get an idea of what it's like from the first 15 seconds of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euWIV34kQ78

Two of those crossings are within a mile of Fort Gosho and I can hear the train whistle clearly, especially at night when there's so much less ambient noise around, and I've visited someone who lives within a hundred yards of one in a building with a roof terrace. When a train passes the whistle all but drowns out conversation. I really don't know how anyone could possibly live there, mush less 'learn' how to sleep through it.

That train whistle is actually quite a pleasant sound to hear... in the distance.

8pm in NYC is 1am in London, of course

Numbers is something I have just as much trouble with as sleeping, and telling left from right.

Here is my last apartment. http://goo.gl/maps/YjXH7

Yep, that's two tracks just West of them. (And look at all those power lines.)

Before I rented this apartment, I asked the receptionist how often the trains ran at night. She replied that she'd never heard them at night.

After I moved in I quickly noticed the trains passed by roughly every 15 minutes, 24 hours/day.

A week or two later I noticed that the receptionist didn't live there.

Oh, take a look at that map again and scroll a bit to the WNW.

Yep. That's a sewage treatment plant. Luckily it wasn't usually upwind but when it was...

Good grief, you've got it all there barring an international airport next door

I can't resist this, told to me by a kid I knew at school who had German parents. It works best when spoken, but you'll get the idea, especially Sho.

A man moves into a house in a small German town. The first night he's kept awake by what sounds like a train. The next morning he asks his neighbours where the railway is. They tell him the town doesn't have a railway running through it. The following night exactly the same thing happens, and the night after that. He decides to track it down (no pun intended), so he waits until midnight and then leaves his house and follows the sound, which he eventually finds out is coming from a nearby factory. He goes in, finds the manager and explains his predicament. "Ah", the manager says, "I think I know what is at the bottom of this. We have a very polite workforce here". The man is still none the wiser. "Let me take you into the factory" says the manager, and they walk onto a shop floor full of people saying "Bitte schön danke schön bitte schön danke schön bitte schön danke schön".

I'll get me coat

I just took a little google walking tour from my old apartment to my old work place a couple of miles down the road. While my old apartment complex hasn't changed, I don't recognize much else in the neighborhood. Granted, it was 20 years ago. I'm not sure if the neighborhood changed that much or if I just never really took much notice. I was a wage slave. I couldn't afford to do much other than work and sleep. On a weekend I might rent a movie and get a six pack of Mickey's Big Mouths. I'd sit in that little tiny apartment and watch the movie and listen to those trains every 15 minutes. I did do a bit of bike riding and that was the one very good thing about that apartment was that it was right on Braes Bayou and its bike trail. But back then, there weren't many other bike trails so I just pretty much stuck to that one.

I was young and unappreciative back then. I'd love to live in Houston now. (Well, I'd have to have a new job up there because I'm not going to commute again.) I now, occasionally, put my bike on the car and take it up to Houston just to ride around and see the sights, hit a pub or two. I'd go more often, but I really hate the drive up there if there's any traffic. Being young and poor (and often depressed) I just didn't look around and see what I was missing.

Weird...

Sorry about that little trip down memory lane.

http://www.channel4.com/news/night-shifts-benefits-health-social-work-life
Nightwork can be good for some things.

Well, let's take that point by point.

Pain-free commute to work.
That's true, and in my case - delivering magazines all over London through the night - I had wonderfully empty roads for the most part. I tried to engineer my route so that I ended up in the West End towards the end because the traffic there only dies down for a few hours, between maybe 3am and 6am, but out in the suburbs you've got six or seven hours of freedom. Once the early morning bread/newspaper deliveries begin though, and then the first hints of the rush hour, that's when it's good to be heading home. Another good thing was that the cops would usually turn a blind eye if you drove a little over the speed limit and looked like you were working. Nothing too outrageous - 40mph in a 30 limit at 3am was generally okay. But then speed cameras started to make their appearance.

Better pay.
Maybe for some jobs, but I don't know about for all. With corporate arrogance being at the kind of levels we haven't seen for a century, union power weaker than it was 30 years ago and cost-cutting being the only thing that matters to companies these days, I wouldn't be at all surprised if night shifts for a lot of jobs pay no more than day shifts.

Better with kids.
True, if your night shift hours allow it and you can work your sleeping pattern around theirs.

Time for the things you'd need to take time off for.
Possibly. I'd usually finish around 6.00 or 7.00am and go straight to bed, which meant I got up around lunchtime/early afternoon, so after breakfast there would have been time to do those things, but it just as easily be the case that you end up sleeping throughout the normal working day/opening times for things like that.

Tricks of the light.
True, and I'd add being up for things like meteor showers, which the astronomers usually say you should view just before dawn, and for recording that blackbird singing in the dead of night, which they really do - I have the tape to prove it and it's a wonderful thing And then there was that time I finished my work around 3am and drove out of London into Essex so that I could view that comet away from the light pollution of the metropolis.

You can be your own boss.
Mostly true.

I should probably add to point one that my route would have been all but impossible during the day, at least in the time allotted. It would have taken three or four hours longer to cover all those miles in daytime traffic.

Which made it all the more frustrating to be stuck at a red light in the middle of the night with no traffic passing you in the other direction on the green light and with a full load on which makes it all the more difficult to get back up to speed from a standing start. I once counted, on a map, the number of traffic lights I had to pass through. I honestly can't remember how many it was (in the hundreds for sure), but without the time I had spend waiting for so many of them them to go green and then pulling away and accelerating up to 30 or 40mph again, I could have cut at least an hour off my run

I remember reading an article about some town in, I believe, Northern Europe that did an experiment where they removed all the traffic lights in town and just let drivers rely on common sense and courtesy. Traffic flow increased and commuting time decreased significantly.

That sounds familiar. I think they might have tried it in the UK too because I remember seeing a report where British drivers and pedestrians were expressing incredulity at the idea

A good one is Drachten in the Netherlands (it's called shared space)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpHlj5j7nyY

Exhibition Road in London has done it too, apparently, but I haven't seen it. (and organisations for the blind have been complaining about it, but the only reports I've seen didn't actually show proper shared space so I can't comment on that).

I'm interested in this concept since I studied it for a while as part of my OU course in social studies. There's a fair bit of it here in Germany, particularly in small towns such as mine. We have a shared space in the middle where a north/south pedestrian route is intersected by an east/west road. So they've taken away all road signs, all priorties and the speed limit for vehicles is walking pace. It works really really well.

Here's Exhibition Road. It's not what I'd call a classic shared space because there are clear demarcations as to where pedestrians should be and where vehicular traffic should be. It's very exciting though.

Ah yes, I'd heard about the Exhibition Road scheme, but that's not the one I was thinking of. I believe it was in a provincial town somewhere.

did you look up Drachten? That's the really famous one, it's not that far from me, I think, and I often think I'd like to drive over and take a look.

I slept right through until 8.30am this morning To put that into perspective, yesterday morning I decided to get up after I'd been tossing and turning for about an hour, even though it was dark and I knew it must be early. When I got out of bed and my eyes were able to focus enough to see the digital clock on the microwave (try wearing that one Arthur Dent) I saw that it was 6.15, so I must have woken up soon after 5am.

That's often the way it goes, and there are few things as boring as lying in bed for an hour or two in the morning waiting for the alarm to turn on the radio at the time you wish you could sleep until.