Tired...

[danalwyn]

Friday/Saturday schedule:

08:20 - Wake up because I can't sleep anymore.
11:00 - Try to call my brother before he vanishes off to college.
12:00 - Give up on brother, go into work
12:20 - Get to office
19:30 - Give up on work, start surfing Wikipedia
20:00 - Try taking nap in office, doesn't work, back to Wikipedia
23:00 - Give up on office. Go to control room.
00:00 - Start shift (officially)
01:00 - Complete first check. Try not to die of boredom.
03:00 - Get second wind
05:30 - Second wind dies.
06:30 - Am so tired that I can no longer stay in my chair more than two minutes without falling asleep
07:54 - Get out of shift.
08:00 - Discover that being too tired to see more than a few inches in front of your face and driving stick shift do not go together well.
08:20 - Get back to apartment, thankfully in one piece. Go directly to bed.
11:30 - Wake up because I can't sleep any more.

I don't think I'm going to make it through a week of this midnight to 8am stuff...

Comments

Dude...

[john-yik.livejournal.com]

20 hours? No wonder you're tired. I do hope you don't have to do any work in addition to keeping watch over the accelerator. Or, at least, if you do, that you have someone to spell you. Granted, you could always keep the work that you don't do in the day for when nothing's happening in the middle of the night, and use the time for sleep. Is that allowed, by the way?

And I'm curious--why exactly *do* you have to stay up watching the thing 24/7, anyway?

Re: Dude...

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

Someone always has to watch the detector, it functions 24 hours a day and in the event of a problem, the appropriate expert has to be woken up. A burnout in the silicon can destroy the detector in hours (we have a crash button in the control room), a fluctuation in any channel could literally destroy the experiment. So there are actually always four people monitoring and running the detector on our side. I just happened to be picked for the bad shift.

The problem is that this is supposed to be on top of your regular workload. Unfortunately, considering how I feel most of the day, I'm just going to have to push my regular work load back to...well...never.

[silverjackal.livejournal.com]

Two words: Red Bull. Carefully timed consumption of Red Bull has helped me survive some shifts from hell, too. I find it gives me the alertness I need, but doesn't linger, so that I can sleep when I'm supposed to.

Have you ever heard of polyphasic sleep (http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/)? If I could manage to fit it into my work schedule I'd be tempted to try it.

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

Don't have time for polyphasic sleep...

Seriously though, emergencies come up, so I could never stick to the schedule. That's a problem with the world, it rarely does what you need it to when you need it to.

Currently I don't drink Red Bull, but it's a tempting thought.