The Graveyard Shift

When every second counts

I started a job three months ago that I am quitting in seven business days. I used to think business days meant Monday through Friday but I never know what day of the week it is anymore.

My psyche is a casino, where obnoxious, fluorescent carpeting zigzags and random bells clang.

My tattered mind is no longer my own, but a reluctant passenger on Disney’s Space Mountain.

This isn’t normal or natural and it all starts with the worst schedule on the planet.

I Stopped Feeling Safe

I no longer feel I can rely on the most basic component of life: control over my own time.

By the same token, I work in a constricted space that I share with other, random people, which limits control over my own space.

All of this became clear when I went to the dentist. It was only an hour, I knew what to expect — pain and payment. I knew it would stop, eventually.

I do not feel that way about my job, which also distorts my sense of space.

Our agency has a churn-and-burn ethos — new people come and go. I can’t predict who will be there because I can’t keep anyone else’s schedule straight and new hires come and go, but we share the space.

The setup is a recipe for insanity.

The job is 9–1–1 Dispatcher, and I can handle the desultory ring of the emergency line — but the computer system sometimes fails. Randomly.

Yesterday, it took me ten minutes to send Fire to a call for a woman who fell in the street and was bleeding from a head injury. It should have taken half that time, but the computer system froze in an utterly novel way and after trying to fix it for an excruciating three minutes I gave up and switched to another system.

The second time the system froze, another dispatcher was there and put up the call — but we were still slower than we should have been. Thankfully, that was a single-vehicle car accident and the victim was shaken up but uninjured.

The Graveyard Shift

Working overnight causes problems because it disrupts normal metabolic rhythms and blood sugar. The only way to limit the health impacts of night shifts is to avoid eating during the night.

On a practical level, this means eating dinner no later than 9 and not eating again until breakfast around sunrise.

I know from experience going for more than seven hours without food is a disaster for me — even if I load up on protein and fat.

Therefore, I cannot work the graveyard shift. Therefore, I cannot work full-time and get health benefits.

Our agency requires all 9–1–1 Dispatchers to work every shift, so the only way to work full-time is to be ready to change shifts at a moment’s notice with the only certainty being — someday you’ll work the graveyard shift.

Shift changes happen for a variety of reasons. Someone goes on vacation, someone quits, someone gets sick, someone retires. Someone dies.

I knew something was wrong when I went to the dentist, where I felt oddly buoyant. I realized I’d rather spend a shift in the dental chair than in front of my five computer monitors.

We are not our schedules, but the truth is that all mammals need routine.

The special human delusion is our twisted tale that we can, and should, overcome our biology.

Standing on two legs gives us vision so we can see far ahead, and tricks us into believing we can see everything.

Our sophisticated language creates fantastic new worlds yet traps us in hellish rumination.

We have fake fake news.

That’s not a typo: the whole point of “fake news” is to make us doubt reality.

They are lying to you. Or are they?

George Orwell foresaw doublespeak but could not prevent it because it has been with us forever. Language is a tool but also a ruse.

Time is a construct, but that doesn’t make it negotiable.

We are defined by sunrise and sunset, and the seasons. We need to sense that something bigger contains us.

The certainty of routine cradles every living thing, and it’s not until it disappears that we realize how vital a predictable world is to feeling we belong.

The days of the week, clocks, and calendars define the social world. We need them so we can make the shadows in time’s limitless cavern a bit less scary.

It’s one reason other people’s lateness is so exasperating: they’ve broken a basic social contract. They’ve stolen some of our time.

The Worst Schedule on the Planet

Graveyard shift is diabolical because of the health problems that come with it but most would agree the worst shift is the one that eats up your free time.

Take the wretched “split shift,” for example.

That’s the shift school bus drivers have, and there’s an ongoing crisis in hiring school bus drivers. They work from 6 am to 9 am, then again from 2 pm to 5 pm.

They work all day but get paid for half a day.

The worst shift, however, is a non-shift. The one that is constantly changing — a shifting shift. Graveyards can become bearable because we adapt over time (whether we are dead or alive).

You can’t adapt to a tilt-a-whirl, at least not for more than 3 minutes and without the promise of cotton candy.

In the last three months, I’ve worked nine different schedules.

From 6 pm to midnight for two weeks, then from 6 am to 1 pm for three weeks, then from 10 am to 5 pm for a week, then 1 pm to 8 pm for a month.

In between, the days of the week have changed: I had weekends off for a while, then had Mon/Tues/Wed off, then finally had Wed/Thurs/Fri off.

Yesterday, I was scheduled for 2 pm to 9 pm but I didn’t know it because I thought — wrongly — that I could count on something.

What’s an hour, right?

I came home hungry, having to put off dinner for an hour. I ate too much dinner and went to sleep later than usual.

A Bad Schedule Steals Time

Employer X hired me to work no more than 29 hours a week, but calling it part-time is a whopper of a tale.

The reason is obvious: they won’t have to fork over health insurance.

When you work four days a week, seven hours a day — you might as well be full-time.

The full-timers work four days a week, ten hours a day — and make much better money. They do exactly the same work, have the same crappy schedule, and make twice as much money because of health insurance.

When your schedule is all over the place, it feels full-time.

Most people avoid on-call schedules because they know it’s a bad deal. In fact, that is a what salaried job usually is — being available. When you work part-time with no benefits and no salary you have a very specific role.

Your role is to get screwed.

Being on-call or at the mercy of a random schedule sucks up more off-time because you can’t ever predict what you have time to do. The energy and thought it takes to predict anything isn’t worth expending, so you laze away hours trying to feel like you can lasso time itself back into your life.

A bad schedule is a vicious thief of the most valuable thing we have in life: time.

A predictable schedule is the foundation of sound decision-making because it eliminates uncertainties.

A predictable schedule makes healthy habits and routines more likely.

A predictable schedule bestows extra energy because there is less thinking, processing, and readjusting on trivial matters.

I’m Quitting Because This Is Torture

This job has advantages for the right person. It’s interesting, important work. It keeps you on your toes. It’s usually manageable. You can bond with your co-workers and the cops, too.

But I can’t get past the schedule, the low pay, and the way it bleeds into the rest of my life.

A predictable schedule helps you prioritize what matters and what doesn’t.

I haven’t been able to prioritize my mental health, because I can’t think straight.

I’ve stayed at a torturous job too long because I was too disoriented to leave.

This schedule makes it impossible for me to prioritize my non-work time. When I’m not working, I fritter time away in a fruitless quest to regain my equilibrium.

The bottom line is misery, and it hit me in a burst of clarity as I lay blissed out reclining in the dentist's chair having someone poke my gums with a sharp stick.

I get frustrated when I can’t do my job well.

They are replacing the whole antiquated computer system in a few months.

The old system should’ve been scrapped decades ago but the former Chief was a chauvinist pig who treated the females in the dispatch room like dogs. The best they could hope for is he would ignore them. He was a dinosaur when it came to technology.

One more reason we should overthrow the dinosaur patriarchy as soon as possible — so you can get an ambulance or fire truck on the scene quickly.

I got frustrated, but I could handle that. It’s the lack of sleep that’s driving me bonkers.

There is nothing special about the agency where I will soon not be working: all across this country, lack of funding leads to poorly trained dispatchers who give up due to the schedule, the stress, and the impossible demands.

Essential workers in other professions feel the same strain.

I’m feeling slightly safer because this nightmare will end soon, and I’m grateful to the people who do this work because I can’t do it.

I only pray the latest computer glitch doesn’t happen tonight.

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Jean Campbell is based in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She has been writing on Medium for years. She’s recently published her first novel, Down and Out on the Road South, with Wings ePress.