Today is my Friday, and I'm working my first scheduled overtime. Just two hours - 1:00 to 3:00. My normal shift starts at 3:30, but I have the option of starting at 3:15 and leaving at 11:45. So there's a possibility I can squeeze in a fifteen minute break and still get out at 11:45 PM. There's also a possibility I'll be stuck on a call from 3:00 to 3:30 and not get that break at all.
I worked from 11:00 AM to 7:30 PM today. Tomorrow, and for four more days after that, I will work 3:30 PM to 12:00 AM. I will have Thursday and Friday off, and then continue on the 3:30 PM to midnight shift.
I went grocery shopping after work. I had a fairly huge list, and added on a few things. As I packed my purchases into the car, I realized I had forgotten something. I went back in and bought it, and more than twenty dollars of additional groceries.
This shopping trip has to cover the rest of the week and beyond. I've gotten used to being able to pick stuff up as needed when I'm on my way home from work. But there are no longer any stores between work and here that stay open past midnight. The Walmart in Pittston is open twenty-four hours, but going there would involve a ten mile detour. Until I can come up with a better plan, I'll need to get any shopping done on Thursdays and Fridays.
I'm about to start a run of ten consecutive workdays. The first five will be my last week of training, while the next five will be the first week of my regular shift, which will run Saturday through Wednesday. Today, for the first time since leaving my old job, I made up a supply of lunches for the week. Just five, because I only had five chicken thighs set aside in the freezer. I'm all out of cracker crumbs, so I made a modified version of my oven-fried chicken. I incorporated some stuff from a recipe I found online, which suggested initially frying the chicken in an iron frying pan on the stovetop until it is brown on both sides, and then throwing it into the oven at 450 degrees Fahrenheit for fifteen minutes. We'll see how it turned out.
What I'm going to do for lunch the last five days of this run, I'm not sure. I may stop and pick something up sometime before I switch to the later shift. There are very few places - possibly no places - around here that are open past midnight where I can buy lunch ingredients. This was always a problem when I last worked this shift, nearly six years ago. We'll see how long I stay on this shift.
This work week is finally over. After this weekend we move on to a five-day transitional week, followed directly by a five-day work week on my 3:30-to-midnight shift. I need to get a lot of things done this weekend that I won't otherwise be able to do until Valentine's Day and the day after.
So in addition to the new demands on my time that I wrote about a few posts back, I am also spending quite a bit of time with Homer, the cat who is recovering from surgery. He needs to wear an "Elizabethan collar," one of those plastic funnel thingies, whenever he is unsupervised, but the E-collar makes it difficult for him to eat. And his barrage of meds also tends to make him not want to eat. So the home-from-work routine now is: go directly from work to the house across town, spend some time there inspecting both sides for signs of break-ins, head over to my mom's house, put out food for all the cats but Homer, go into Homer's isolation room, remove Homer's collar, cuddle with him a bit (that's his favorite thing), set out food and coax him to eat and drink, give him his meds and replace collar after he is done eating and drinking, then feed the outdoor cats and do whatever else needs to be done. Tomorrow morning is garbage pickup, so that meant hauling out all the garbage before bed today. I haven't been getting to bed before 10:30 lately.
Tomorrow it's supposed to rain all day. I'm hoping I don't have to deal with any basement or street flooding.
My posting will be spotty at best over the next few days as I try to integrate the things that you have to do after you've been robbed with my schedule as a night shift employee. I should have been asleep fifteen minutes ago, but I'm still up.
Fun detail about my post-robbery conversation with the police: It only occurred to me after the fact that, in addition to being sweaty and smelly after going a day-and-a-half without a shower, and dressed in a ripped T-shirt and sweat pants, I was also sporting a lovely huge syringe mark on my left arm, along with some blue marker as a handy guide for the location of the vein - the aftermath of my blood donation the previous day. I think I may need to explain to the investigating officer that this wasn't, in fact, some junkie-on-junkie crime.
I used to play a game as a kid. As my mom would drive us through Nanticoke on the way to my grandmother's or the grocery store or somewhere else, I would look out the window at people on the street. More often than not, the people would suddenly look at me, even if they had originally been looking somewhere else entirely. For more than a few moments, I would be looking at them looking at me. I wondered about these people on the street: who were they, where had they come from, where were they going, what were they thinking, who had they last talked to, what had they had for lunch, how were they feeling? And eventually I developed a game where I would look at a person and project myself into their consciousness, scan their thoughts and their feelings, and see the world through their eyes. See myself through their eyes.
It was all an exercise of imagination, of course. No one can really do that. But I gave myself a few seconds to conjure up a backstory for these people on the street and try to picture how they saw the world. How they saw me.
(I still do this, sometimes, though it's a lot more dangerous when I'm driving. And most of the people I scan on the streets I immediately tag as "insane" or "criminal," neither of which is anything I can work with.)
Believe it or not, I tend to be a very private person. I only let a few people into my innermost world. And usually my reaction on seeing their reaction is the same thing that Lenny on The Simpsons said when a wall of his house collapsed, revealing him sitting at his kitchen table in his underwear eating beans out of a can: "Please don't tell anyone how I live."
In recent weeks I have been trying to reach out to a few people, to try to expand into the Big Wide World. And I think a few of these burgeoning relationships have been derailed by the ugly reality of the schedule I live by: four, or five, or more consecutive nights of work, all but one of them twelve hours long with an hour's commute tacked onto both the beginning and the end, followed by several daytime hours of incoherent exhaustion and several more hours of blissful unconsciousness, with the whole shebang followed by three or four days off, one of which is a "recovery day", all of which are lived in a semi-nocturnal state. And that's a best-case scenario: most weeks I do not know for sure if I am working on a given night until a few hours before the start of that day's shift, and I do not know if I will be required to work overtime until a few hours before the end of the rotation, and even then, scheduled overtime may be cancelled up to a few hours prior to the start of the shift.
I tell people that on days I am scheduled to work I am "non-existent," and this is almost literally true. On those days, just about everything that makes me me is tucked away in cabinets and crevices inside my mind for safe keeping and later unpackaging.
And it gets worse: I have several non-overlapping groups of friends, and they have learned over the years that they may go weeks or even months without seeing or hearing from me, because during those weeks and months I will be somewhere else. In the past this meant I would be off with some other group of friends, but lately it has come to mean that I am probably off hiding somewhere, trying not to spend money I don't have.
For some strange reason, some people have a hard time coming to grips with this fractional existence, and often decide that they'd rather take up with someone who has a more stable 9-to-5 work week with weekends off. Or, at least, that they'd rather not try to fight their way through my unpredictable and highly unstable schedule, and decide not to get involved at all.
Seeing my schedule through their eyes has made me look at it in a new way. No longer is it a just a pain and an annoyance, but now I see it as a deterrent to forming any sort of new long-term relationships. In that sense, I'm glad this is all going away no later than December. I sincerely hope that whatever I find down the road will be more conducive to success in this arena.
'Cause I'm really hating this schedule these days.
Title reference: "As Another Sees Us", short story by Harlan Ellison about a group of astronauts being observed by a colonial life-form made up of millions of tiny insect-like aliens.
We've got one feral cat safely locked up, and I've got a trap set for a second. In less than a half hour I will take one or more feral cats down to the mobile spay and neuter clinic, leave them there, come home, sleep, wake up, and pick them up. Then I'll go back to work.
Friday night was a short night at work, just six hours. Got out at midnight, got home by 1:00. But I couldn't fall asleep until 4:00.
Woke up Saturday morning around 11:00. Did some yard work, used the weed whacker until the battery ran out, then mowed the lawn. It was supposed to rain on Saturday, but it just stayed hot all day. Relocated the trap for the groundhog and baited it with some apples. Vacuumed the house at 10:00 at night.
Today there was a chance I would be working overtime - a twelve hour shift, 6 PM to 6 AM. But by the 8 AM cutoff the recorded message said I would not be needed, so I was able to unpack my plans for the day. Went to church, did some major grocery shopping, transplanted some tomato plants - two into Topsy Turvy planters, one into a large pot. Made turkey soup from the bones from the turkey breast my mom cooked for supper. (Water, turkey bones, some scraps of turkey, some juice from the pan, salt, pepper, allspice, parsley flakes, carrots, leftover corn kernels. I cheated by adding about a teaspoon of chicken bouillon. Simmer for a few hours, or until you figure it's done.)
I also finished reading a book on the Battle of Wyoming that I've been working through for the past few weeks. Fascinating stuff. Makes me look at this area with whole new eyes.
Tomorrow I plan to attack the lawn across town. Maybe fill in some concrete cracks. Maybe, if I feel really ambitious, apply water seal to the three-year-old furniture.
I've been slacking off on some other stuff lately. Maybe it's just me trying to sabotage anything that may change my status quo, which isn't exactly what anyone would call an ideal situation. Well, I know no matter how badly screwed-up I think my life is, or how bleak my future looks, there are people who would gladly walk on broken glass with skewers through their biceps to change places with me. (Wait, that's not true - I know more than a few people who walk on broken glass and put skewers through their biceps for a living, and they actually seem pretty happy.)
Maybe it's just the heat, or the disruptive and unpredictable work schedule. Maybe it's something else. But at some point I have to sit down and do the things that need to be done.
Tuesday night I go back to work - a four (or a six), then three twelves, then four days off.
We've done three twelve-hour days this rotation, and tonight should be a half-day, six hours. Then I'm off tomorrow, when in-between the thunderstorms I will try to mow at least one lawn, shuffle around my compost piles, and get two or three tomato plants into Topsy-Turvy planters.
Sunday I've been mandated for overtime.
Now, this doesn't mean that I'll be working Sunday. But if overtime is available, I am required to take it. Yayyy.
Then off on Monday, when I will try yo get my other lawn mowed, and maybe get my exhaust system brackets re-welded to my car before it comes off entirely.
Tuesday I go back to work, and the fun begins again.
Wow. For the first time in a long time, I came home from work this morning and went straight to bed.
I didn't feel very good last night. Not the usual thirdday stuff, even though it was really two-and-a-thirdday. I kinda had that wrapped-in-cotton feeling. My eyes, when I looked at them, were swollen and pink. But, overall, it was a good night, as far as I recall.
I'm wondering what brought that on. I ate well yesterday before work. Very well. One of the steaks we bought on Tuesday in preparation for my blood donation this coming Wednesday, plus a baked potato and a salad. I don't usually eat red meat - not out of any philosophical objection to it, just because I don't like it very much. I am wondering if maybe I had some sort of reaction to this meal.
Two more nights to go. Then Election / shopping / lawnmowing Tuesday, then blood donation / comic book store / maybe dinner with a friend / garbage Wednesday, then other lawnmowing / everything else Thursday. Then back to work on Friday. I hope.
"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
Posts
