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

I've been working a regular Monday to Friday schedule for three or four weeks now. I don't care for it, but that's another conversation. Yet another conversation, which I think we've already had, is my tendency to fall asleep on the sofa at some point during the evening for anything up to three hours.

Last night I got home from work around 5.30pm. I took off my boots, got out of my travelling-to-work clothes, took my work clothes out of my bag, made a cuppa and sat down on the sofa. Next thing I know it's almost dark outside and the clock is telling me it's 9pm. Oh well, there goes half my Friday evening, let's get a bite to eat and watch something. One pork sandwich, one episode of The Avengers, this week's Have I Got a Bit More News For You (did Gary Squeaky-Clean Lineker really say *that* word ), and halfway into listening to a Goon Show, I fall asleep again... must have been around 11pm. I wake up at 2am.

Sigh. Oh well, I might as well go to bed and read until my eyelids can't stay open any more, which was only about 15 minutes, and after I switched out the light it wasn't long before I nodded off. My radio alarm came on at 7am, and I was still fast asleep at the time, despite having had about six hours kip during the previous evening, and another four and a half in bed.

Excluding evenings when I've gone out, which is only once a week, if that, I can't remember the last time I didn't fall asleep on the sofa for at least an hour (usually more) during the evening. Okay, I know that my alarm goes off at some time between 5am and 6am on work days, depending on what time I'm scheduled to clock in, and that I usually go to bed around midnight (I know that if I go to bed any time before midnight I'll wake up at 5am anyway), but you're supposed to need less sleep as you get older. After a year of working at my first job on a 8am to 4.30pm schedule, I switched to working 7am to 6pm each day, Monday to Friday. If I went over to a friend's place of an evening I'd start falling asleep soon after 10pm, but I was only 19 then and needed more sleep that I do 40 years later.

I've turned into my dad.

Either that... or somehow, my sleep has transferred to you

You're very welcome to have some of it back

Oh... if only! I've never felt so tired in my life as I do now; and never slept as little, at the same time