Worrying, before the first night

So I’m a little worried about working the night shift at the grocery warehouse. I hate to be a wuss, but there it is.

It’s the sleep cycle disruption, in large part. It has been a long time since I have stayed up late with any frequency. Usually I am in bed by 10 p.m., or earlier, and I almost always get at least eight hours of sleep. Even when I was a graduate student I went to bed at a reasonable time and I slept enough. During the years my main work was growing vegetables I was up fairly early and in bed early, and the availability of daylight was a basic requisite of my activities. Several years ago I briefly worked as a milker at a nearby dairy farm — only briefly for various reasons, but chief among them was that I just couldn’t get used to getting up hours before the sun rose.

My shift will be 7 p.m. to 5:30 a.m., or maybe later if the warehouse is busy. The commute will be close to an hour each way. These hours will at least allow me to see my wife and one-year-old daughter for an early dinner and then, when I get home from work, to see them off to work and daycare. After that, I’ll need to sleep, but apparently lots of night shift workers find it impossible to sleep more than four or five hours at a stretch, and on average sleep an hour and a half less than daytime workers — most of whom don’t sleep enough themselves.

It’s not just sleep that worries me, though. If I do sleep eight hours out of the 24, work 10 and commute about two, that will leave me just four hours left out of a work day. I’ll probably get up a hour before I leave home. That leaves three, during which I’ll need to eat dinner and sometimes prepare it, take care of any housework that needs doing, pay some attention to our dog, attend to email and this blog, and do whatever errands or urgent repairs or anything else there is to do. Maybe even get outside for some fresh air and wholesome exercise. My concern is less the dearth of free time than the subjective sense I anticipate having that almost the whole of the day is taken up with a highly repetitive, essentially meaningless job. I’m afraid I’ll get very depressed.

There’s another thing: I’ve always worked for very small operations, and usually ones that I considered in way contributing to the sort of world I want to live in. I’ve worked for a one-owner, one store video rental business; a small contractor; a few small farms, small-town weekly newspapers; a tiny meditation cushion factory; and a landscaper who employed at most three people. I worked for a few weeks for a ski mountain, which was a bigger-scale outfit, but still a little mom-and-pop operation as such places go. And I worked in the outlet store of a local knife factory that had about 90 employees, but I worked alone. I’m used to being friendly with the bosses (usually), being known as an individual, and enjoying a minimum of bureaucracy.

I think the warehouse will be different. The company is the tenth-largest privately held company in the U.S., and has 70 locations. Twelve hundred people are employed at the warehouse where I’ll be working. I’m going to be a small cog in a large machine.

Since being informed of my hiring, I’ve been psyching myself up for the experience by viewing it as a research opportunity — research into industrial work, circadian rhythms, class, and pallet jack technique. I’ve also been trying to gradually change my sleep habits by staying up later and, the past couple of days, sleeping later. Tonight I mean to be up until 3 a.m., which is the time I’ll get off work tomorrow. (The day after, I’ll start the regular hours, ending at about 5:30 a.m.)  I’ve had the misfortune to have caught a cold recently, and am still getting sicker, which makes it harder to stay awake, but I know if I don’t it will be harder to adjust later.