First night... 6 hours to go

Where I work, the roster is 4 days on 4 days off. Sounds pretty good at first. Until you realise that two 10 hour day shifts are followed quickly by two long 14 hour nights. Second nightshift is hard, but I have always found the first nightshift to be the worst. If you're lucky you have managed to get some sleep during the day before, but if you are like me, you just can't get quality sleep during the day. So by 1 am on the first night I can be really struggling.

I start looking at the clock and doing the maths to work out how much sleep I've had in the last 24 hours. Sometimes its a little scary. Then when I get home I find I'm totaling the few 15 or 30 minute blocks of sleep I've been able to grab during my shift and adding them to what I'm likely to get between my shifts. Its usually a sum total of about 5 hours. It's never enough.

When I get home after nightshift, I'm usually too trashed to read, so I crawl into bed and try to fall asleep.....Then there comes the inevitable knock on the doorat 9.30am just after I've got to sleep, from someone with a dodgy looking ID tag round their neck and a clipboard. It takes less than a millisecond even in my sleep deprived haze to realise they are going to try and sell me something. I'm too tired to get angry and usually manage to politely decline their offer of "5 rooms steam cleaned for $75 with a free upholstery refresher treatment" or inevitably something similar. Back to my pillow, where I spend a few minutes wondering if that was actually a good deal on the carpet cleaning before drifting off again.....only to be whippa snipp'd awake at midday by the Jim's Mowing guy as he manicures my neighbours lawn.

So often I give up by about 1.pm (er sorry, 1300 hours) and decide to get out of bed and do some laundry or wash the dishes from the last couple of days. Later on in the afternoon I hear my alarm go off in my room and I wonder why I bothered setting it at all. Drag on my overalls, drink two cups of coffee, make some dinner to take with me and head off to do it all again.