Night Shift

I work overnight, and my schedule from week to week allows me to have Tuesday & Wednesday nights off as my weekend. I also take every other Thursday off as I work 46 hours each week I do the Thurs-Mon routine. Working the night shift has its obvious minuses--isolation, feeling out of synch with the rest of the world. But the Night Shift does have some nice advantages.

"Day People" are for the most part political critters. Night Folk for the most part won't be liquid papering our names on staplers or declaring a cubicle to be "ours" even when we share it across shifts. Third Shift people at law firms seem to be pretty much independent, self-starters, mavericks even. We know we're there to do a job and we don't make our jobs into our lives. Lots of us who work third are artists, have other businesses, or fill our diurnal lives with other possibilities that we wouldn't be able to do if we worked the mainstream shift.

Personally, I think 2nd Shift is harder. I used to work a second shift at another firm, which I think liked to take newcomers to the legal field because the vibe of the place was vampiric. (Footnote/sidebar: Some night shift folk like to use the word "vampire" to describe ourselves b/c the bloodsuckers are creatures of the night. I personally don't like that word to describe us because the way I use the word "cunt" is the onomatopoetic sound they make when the fangs go into the flesh of their prey, and then the metonymic application thereof so that "cunts" act as a stand-in for "vampires" like "grunts" can mean laborers. Also I don't have the cunt politics of say a Dick Cheney or a Cuntonin Scalia. Talk about vampires!) It's pretty clear to me that nice people start out as associates at law factories, then they slowly turn into scary people who have to put up with a lot of abuse, not only from the partners and the loathesome clients, but also from their peers who come into the fray in a manner not unlike what happens with pledges and fraternity hazings. As a word processor in this toxic environment, I was deemed pretty low on the totem pole, though to some not quite the lowest. I always felt like I was being fed to the wolves.

2nd Shift at a law firm deals with the pressures of Fed-Ex cut-offs. That's the shift that always feels like it's running up against the clock. First shift can feel that way in a cyclical pattern, but with Second it's neverending. Third Shift seems to be a shift where the time can flow out generously. There's nothing quite like having a huge Offering Memorandum with lots of changes and 8 whole hours to get it done, get it to Proofreading and then back in for corrections until the doc is done. Third Shift is expansive that way.

There was no Third Shift at the previous firm. Second shift there and at other firms seems to me to be the most difficult shift, not only within the culture of the company but also extending out into the sphere of my life. It literally shut my life down. At least with graveyard, I have some socializing options, but with 2nd Shift, I was getting up when people were working, I was working when people were socializing, and getting off work when people were either going to bed or in various states of inebriation on the weekends. Later I found out from a nurse who's worked the various shifts in the hospitals, that the 2nd Shift was the "Drunk Shift" and the Third Shift was the "Compulsive Eating Shift." I think that's also probably true of law firms, though not of the one I work at presently. As for the other one, I didn't stay there long enough to give that a thorough vetting.

With these benefits, the real question is do I wish for this lifestyle to continue on for the rest of my days? No, obviously, I don't. The gift/curse of the human being is that we can acclimate ourselves to all sorts of situations. I'm now in a stage where it's important I don't isolate anymore. I need to get out into the world and be a bigger part of it. Perhaps this is a counterintuitive way to do it--I'm still by myself, typing these words into a computer, at 3:40 a.m. or so. Gotta have faith. My friends, sponsors, and spirit guides are all counseling me to mix it up a lot more. One day I'll have a diurnal life again. But this is the way it is for now.

And of course, I'll have a lot more to say later.