Night moves

College acceptance notices have been making their ways to kith and kin. Plans are being finalized. Checks are being cut. More checks must follow, and funding for said checks is being hunted. I remember when I faced this gig in high school. My first move was to find my way into a job where I could work night shifts.

By lining up night work, I was able to pile up a lot of overtime hours. I only had to do this for a summer, but it was enough to bank some much-needed college cash.

It’s interesting that fully half the day isn’t day, but we don’t hear much about it in the working context. The term “night life” applies to leisure, not labor.

Although I never had a vampire-like attraction to midnight’s call, I’m glad I made my peace with it early on. Later on, the graveyard shift I have crossed paths a number of times.

Comfort and adventure reside at opposite ends of the spectrum, and if you want to sail the seven seas, or bore holes in the sky as a pilot, or serve in uniform, or some combination of the above, you’re probably going to be facing a lot of duty at “zero-dark-hundred.”

And, of course, doctors, nurses, tourism workers, and critical public-service workers are also no strangers to night work, as Saipan knows.

Still, of all the industries that seem to come alive at night, I’d have to pick transportation as a prime player. Trucks and cargo planes ply their routes, tended by a vast nocturnal infrastructure of dispatchers, mechanics, load masters, fuelers, and warehouse workers, and their midnight oil is kept burning by a related world of cooks, waiters and waitresses, hotel clerks, and so on.

I’ve known people who took night shifts because they were junior and low on the scheduling totem pole, only to stick with the dark side because they liked the people they worked with. The office politics and bureaucratic pettiness of the normal working day are often absent from the night routine.

Because of the challenges of darkness and fatigue, night work can be a lot less forgiving of haste or errors. This is one realm that meshes with my natural inclination to be a methodical slowpoke. Of course, nobody gives you credit for the problems you avoided by being methodical, since nobody can tally a problem that didn’t show up, but that’s one of life’s unavoidable quirks.

Now here’s something that can show up: health risks. We’re not designed to go for years and years working at night. From what I’ve seen, those who are already carrying some un-optimal habits, such as a lot of smoking, or heavy drinking, or unwise eating, can pay a compounded health toll if there’s also a lot of night work in the equation, especially when middle age comes along. In that case, when Mother Nature decides to audit our mortal books, she apparently stacks our sins as exponents.

Night work can affect people who don’t even do night work. I knew an advertising man who worked in the golden days of the industry. He told me that when he was a young executive he was put on a new account for a regional beer company. A beer account didn’t seem too bad, and there’s a lot of room for creativity in the ads, so he was happy to draw this duty.

Well, he was happy at first, that is.

They started slicing and dicing the demographics of their target market, only to realize that a discernable portion of it was consuming beer in the early hours in some taverns. These taverns were near factories that ran shifts all around the clock. When the graveyard shift showed up after work, it was pretty much what everyone else considered breakfast time.

In order to get an eyeball-to-eyeball feel for this part of the action, the ad man was assigned to morning duty in some of these taverns. He’d drink beer, try not to look like an executive, and just sort of blend in and observe the market first hand. This totally blew the rest of his day, and he was glad when this part of the project was behind him. He said a three-beer breakfast is a lot harder on the brain than a three-martini lunch.

Well, that was an old-school tale, and the new school has concerns of its own as it faces college and the future. The leaden realities of a blue-collar night job might not jibe with the sunny promise of college, but, in my case, an empty checking account tied those two opposite concepts together.