I currently work twelve hour graveyards on the weekends (5:00 pm-5:30 am, F-S). I have more issues with the fact that I’m working weekends (when everybody else is off) than overnights.
I’ve worked evenings and days over the years. The sleep patterns for graveyards suits me better than anything but 9-5. I’m not really a morning person.
Living by myself in an apartment complex made up primarily of the forty and up crowd, I don’t have to deal with kids’ noise when I sleep. I have no problem sleeping in the daylight (in fact, when I slept nights, I usually went to sleep with the light on). On my days off, I usually get to bed a couple of hours earlier than during the work week and rise around the same time. I tend to use Monday mornings to schedule things like doctor’s appointments (asking for the very first one of the day) and go to those before going to bed. Much easier than trying to get up after three or four hours sleep.
If I could do these hours M-W or other days that didn’t involve weekends, I would never try to find another shift.
Where I am in Central NC, “Swing” shift refers to something completely different than how it’s been referenced in this thread. Here we have 1st shift, 2nd shift, and 3rd shift. 1st shift is the normal morning to afternoon schedule that most people have. 2nd shift is the afternoon to midnight, and 3rd is the midnight to morning. The start and stop times vary by employer.
Swing shift here means working 1st for a week, 2nd the next week, and 3rd the next. Swing shift will fuck you up.
My least favorite shift to work is 2nd for a variety of reasons. Social life has been mentioned, but mainly I like to have a few hours of me time after work, then sleep. On 2nd I would go to bed as soon as I got home, get up early and try to do errands then go to work. It all felt ass backwards. At least on 3rd, you can get off work in the morning and go grocery shop when the store is empty, do some errands and then sleep till it’s time for work.
I worked night shift (11:30pm - 8:30am) 5 nights a week for a little over 3 years, and I had no problems with it. I loved it in fact. The post I quoted described the situation I was in exactly. The only difference was that every third weekend I was also on call, so that week I would also only have to work 4 nights.
I was by myself at work until about 7:30am, except for going outside for certain scheduled things. I usually was able to get all my work done and a lot of times take a cat nap, listen to music, and read a book. I got a lot of stuff done then.
But they eliminated the night shift position, so now I’m on days and it’s not as fun. I still usually leave a light on when I sleep (though that has more to do with needing to wake up if my phone rings, because THEY ELIMINATED THE NIGHT SHIFT PERSON).
I think the mid shift 12-8 AM is the best. No problem with most social events, though some I had to leave early.
I always have laughed at those who say they can not sleep during the day. These are the guys who work day shift, get home, and set in their recliner and nap until dinner time.
When you work the mid shift you do not have to go home go to bed and get 8 straight hours of sleep. Learn to take naps. sleep for an hour or three. If you wake it is OK to get up and get busy then go back to bed later. when I worked nights I needed 6 hours of sleep everyday. When I work days I need at least 8 hours.
I worked 3rd shift for 1 year (exactly 1 year), and I hated it.
I was on a 4x10 schedule, which sounded better than a 5x8, but it still sucked.
I couldn’t spend time with my GF, so that relationship went to shit. I couldn’t see my aunt (who’s one of my best friends) except for 1 or 2 days on my “weekend”. When family came into town I couldn’t see them. I couldn’t make any new friends because of my schedule. I couldn’t play Ultimate Frisbee anymore because I couldn’t make it to practice. I couldn’t find a new GF because of my schedule.
The only good thing that came out of it was that I had to adhere to this ridiculously rigid schedule just to be able to function, so I was running 6 days a week with a race nearly every Sunday (that was one of my weekend days), so I was in great shape. But after the race was over, I couldn’t stay and socialize; I had to go home to sleep so I could go to work that night (I worked 10p-8:30a).
I know it works for some people, but under no circumstances, NONE, would I ever do it myself again.
One thing to keep in mind is that you have to transition into regular night shift. Your biorhythms are going to be incredibly messed up for a week or so…when I first started overnight (I worked graveyard for a 24-hour supermarket for about six months a long time ago), I was very easily confused (shut up!) for four or five days, to the point where I couldn’t even THINK coherently for more than five minutes at a time (I said, shut up!). I ended up bursting into tears at one point just because I was in an argument with my mother and couldn’t marshal my thoughts enough to keep up with her.
Again, some love it some hate it. I work 12-hour nights and would never want to work full-time days again (I do have to work some day-shifts right now, those are the shifts I hate). The lack of management around at night getting in the way is reason enough to love working nights. I can actually get shit done at night-time. On the day shift, there are meetings and people changing their minds, then changing them back again, and whatever the panic-du-jour is. Fuck that, give me the night shift any time.
If you don’t mind me asking, how is the overnight shift at your pharmacy? I’ve always been a night person, so I’ve been thinking of trying to do overnights once I graduate from pharmacy school, but I haven’t had the opportunity to really speak to a pharmacist who did that shift regularly.
How busy is it? How late does your techs stay? How long are you by yourself? Do you get mostly scripts from the ER? Do you actually get many patients coming in, or is it mostly the courtesy fills and catching up from the previous day, along with busy work like CII audits, cycle counts, etc?
Taking a 2nd shift (3-11) job was the best thing I ever did for myself. I’m one of those people whose brains are apparently just not wired to get up at the ass-crack of dawn every day and be asleep by 10 at night. I spend years being miserable trying to fit in to a “daytime” routine.
Then 2005 came along, and I found my still-current job. When asked which shift I would prefer, I jumped at the chance to work 2nd. (The previous job required me to be on site by 6 AM. I was barely functional for those 6 months.) After a couple weeks, I’d fallen in to a schedule of being awake 2-3 hours on either side of work. Even better, I could maintain it without any chemical (legitimately prescribed) help. I still set my alarm, but don’t even need it 3-4 days out of the week. Mentally and physically, there’s an amazing difference between now and then.
I don’t think these hours hurt functioning with the rest of the world all that much. If I need to schedule some appointment in the morning, it requires getting up a couple hours earlier one day, it sucks, but that’s generally doable if it’s only one day. I’d say it helps as far as weekend socialization. If the night goes a bit late, everyone else has their schedules thrown off from being up “so late” while for me it’s rarely more than an hour or two so later than when I normally go to sleep.
I do sleep with a fan on for white noise, but this is something I’ve done for almost 20 years regardless of what schedule I’ve kept. Decent curtains (heavy but not “blackout” curtains) help too, but I think I could get by without them if my bedroom window wasn’t facing east.
I’m going to disappoint you with my answer, but I’m out of retail now (Thank God and Thank You again).
I’ll pass along some thoughts from a colleague who used to do midnights at Walgreens: There was generally only the pharmacist and one tech, responsible for a very busy store with 2 hospital ERs within striking distance, and a large pile of automatic refills to be done just in case they got caught up. They rarely did, at least until the dayshift techs reported.
They did have the same 7-on,7-off schedule that I’m on, though, and that really makes all the difference. The trick is to be able to transition from nights to days when you want to. If you can, you have a much better schedule – I remember the Rip Torn character from Men In Black: “…you’ll get used to it, or you’ll have a psychotic breakdown.”
I urge you to consider how much you’re prepared to put up with before you go into retail. Myself, I’m not going back.
I’ve worked night shift (11-7) for going on 25 years. I’m sure you’ve already gotten the gist of the answer–the reaction to working nights is a very individual thing. Personally, I love it but I’ve always been a night person so working this shift, for me, was finally getting a job that worked with my body clock.
It takes some adjustment for most people. On the other hand, I’ve known people who worked nights for years and never really adjusted to it. I was that way when I had a day job–I could do it but I never felt like I was fully functional. (I’ve come to admit that there are some very nice things about the early mornings–if you’re still up from the night before. Not a damn one of those things is worth getting up for though.)
You do have to train the people in your life to respect your schedule. Day people tend to think it’s no big deal to call or come by during the day. Once I stopped being polite when people woke me up (Some might say the correct phrase was “Once I got bitchy about it”), they started getting the idea. For the hard core offenders, you can always call them at 2 or 3 AM and say, “Hey, I was sound asleep when you called before. I remember you called but not what it was about. What did you want?”.
It does help a lot if you’re single. It’s harder if you have a family, especially small kids. Most people I work with switch back to being day people when they’re off. It’s hard on them, especially that first day off. As a dyed-in-the-wool night owl, I keep the same hours whether I’m working or not, although I do tend to stay up later in the day than I do if I have to work that night.
When you sleep varies between people. I know people who sleep as soon as they get home, then get up in the early afternoon. Others stay up most of the day and sleep in the evening until time to go to work. I generally stay up till 10 or 11 and then get up at 7. I like a sleep mask to help me sleep in the daytime.
One of the big ups to working nights is that it tends to be more laid back in general. You tend to have little contact with the administrative types. The downside is that pretty much the rest of the world is completely counter to your schedule and it has little sympathy for you working nights.
It’s really disorienting for me to be out in the daytime, outside of the early morning. It’s too bright and way too crowded.
And for some it’s the natural shift. The Best Boyfriend had moved from being a metal worker to IT shortly before we met; his first IT job was office hours and we used to joke that his coworkers must be real bad, given that he was getting good reviews in spite of being someone whose brain didn’t start working before 14:00. At one point he was asked whether he’d be willing to move to the graveyard shift, “the hours are bad and some people never adapt to them, but it pays better.”
Let’s see: work at the hours when you’re naturally awake, and better pay? Gee, I don’t know, he had to think reeeeeeal hard about that one!
OTOH, my natural hours are as set-in-stone as his, but I’m a morning person. Graveyard just kills me dead. I’ve worked other “unusual” shifts (weekends-and-holidays, 12h 6-6, one week days and one nights) and the hardest thing was getting people to understand that I could not come have coffee at 4pm on a Sunday: either I’d be at work, or I’d have to be getting ready to be at work at 17:45 not having slept more than half an hour since Saturday morning. It was not that I “did not want to”, but that I “could not.” Apparently the difference is too subtle, because people still didn’t grok it after two years with that regime, and I’m talking about close family, not about someone I only saw once a year.
I worked a 9pm-6am shift for a few years and liked it. I was still able to have a regular social life. It was occasionally inconvenient for evening activities because I’d have to cut out early to make it to work. It was certainly a very productive schedule for me. If I had errands like shopping and such i could easily do them while a majority of people were off the roads and out of the stores.
After that I had a 3pm-12am shift. That was the worst shift ever. Seeing friends and family was near imposable leaving me with nothing to do. I hated that shift.
If a well paying job came along I would happily go back to 3rd shift. I hate getting up mornings.
Now this was 20 years ago when I was in my late 20’s…….
Graveyard was OK. It screws with your mind somewhat but some things where great. You get to go to the stores when nobody is there. Have a beer at 9am. One of my best friends is a girl I meet working GY. There is a certain camaraderie that is hard to put to words. It’s like living in a different world with different beings. It’s a different world. Really.
I absolutely hated working the 3-11 swing shift. But it did do one thing for me. I learned to cook. I got home at 11pm when everyone was going to bed. I needed a quite hobby. I started cooking.
I had to do that same schedule for a year. I had no social life during that time other then people I worked with on that same schedule. I paritculary hated having to readjust my body to a new schedule every single week, so the first couple days were murder. By the time my body was pretty much adjusted, I’d be going to a new shift, so I had to start the process all over again.
And I really hated 2nd shift because it’s hard to get much done. Most things are closed when you get off work and it’s hard to do things before work because you might be late to work(or have to leave food in your car all day).
I work graveyard shift (11pm-7am) full time. It’s my normal routine, so I’m used to it. It’s a lot rougher on the guy who works on my weekends. He has to screw up his sleep cycle twice a week.
When you work graveyard, sleep is extremely important. Some people go home at 7am and go to bed immediately. Then they are awake during the early evening, which gives them some time for a social life. I prefer to sleep from noon to 8pm. That way, I have free time in the mornings, when banks and stores are open.
From noon to 8, I do not answer the door, and if the phone rings, I check the Caller ID. 99% of the time it is just some salesman, so I let the machine answer it. I am a childless bachelor, so I can get away with it.
This was kinda like my experience as well. Do the appointments early in AM right after work…head home, crash. I was usually more like a 10-6 sleeper. Except for the obvious relationship challenges, working 11-7 basically is just you leaving for work when everyone else is heading for bed and sleeping while everyone else is working, so it works out about the same. Fortunately I lived in a very quiet area and had good blinds.
The funny story, I had to do some oddbal schedules to cover a vacation with a day shift slot I was trained for. Forgot to set my alarm. Was supposed to be at work @ 6pm. Fell asleep reading, woke up saw my clock showing 5:50 and thought I was gonna be late…dressed quickly, ran out the door, and thought…something looks wrong. I had mistaken the gloomy sunset look for gloomy sunrise look, I was running out the door in a panic 12 hours before my shift was to start.
