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

Hey WD Regarding the discussion about the Zeebrugge disaster and shift work.

I spent 12 years working through the night on one, two, three, occasionally four nights a week. Never again I really enjoyed it at first - flying around the streets of London in the wee hours of Sunday night/Monday morning dropping off magazines, driving on routes normally clogged with traffic, not having to worry about finding somewhere to park, being able to disregard aprking restrictions, only going out one night a week and getting paid pretty well for it.

I've never been much of an early morning person and this seemed to suit me very well. If I'd go to bed at 10pm, get a good seven or eight hours sleep and wake up at 6am I'd feel like , but working until 5am (after having been up since 8am the previous morning), getting to sleep at 6am, then getting up five hours later 11am seemed to have no effect on me - I woke feeling fresh as a daisy

Even after a couple of years, by which time I was driving three nights a week, I didn't mind it too much - hell, my van radio could even pull in the American Forces Network from Germany and I could listen to baseball games as I was working And I was raking in the dough

I'm not sure at what point things turned, but for the last three or four years of night work I hated going out at 11pm or midnight when my body was screaming BEDTIME at me, and the more I hated it the further back my dread of Sunday night crept. At first I didn't think about it at all. Then I started feeling it on Sunday afternoon. Then when I went to bed on Saturday I started thinking 'This is my last regular night until next Wednesday', and so on, until it got to the point where I'd be going to bed on Wednesday night (I worked Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights) thinking 'Only four more regular bedtimes then I've got to go out and work through the night again'.

It's had good and bad effects on me. I have no trouble staying up late if I need to. I never get jetlag any more... well, not when I'm travelling from east to west. Flying from London to anywhere in America is piece of cake - it's just like working until 8am. Travelling in the opposite direction is a little more difficult cos you normally end up on the redeye, but I don't feel it as bad as I used to before I started night work.

But my overall sleep patterns are pretty screwed up these days. I have no problem going to bed at a regular bedtime, but I'll almost always wake up at least once during the night and it takes me forever to get back to sleep. I'm permanently tired and I have to go to bed in the afternoon for a couple of hours on average once a week.

You often hear stories about blokes who have worked on a night market like Smithfield or Billingsgate or Spitalfields for their whole life (or at least for a couple of decades), who die within a year or two of retirement because their body can't adjust to normal sleep patterns. I don't know how much truth there is in those stories or whether they're just urban myths.

I know one thing for sure though - I'm never, ever going to do night work again as long as I live. I'm not even wild about doing late shifts, and I treasure the early morning these days