So Little Sleep
In honor of all the sleep deprived people going to work and walking around and doing their best, and myself getting only a few hours of sleep last night, I want to talk about how your sleep schedule is determined by your work hours. Technically, we, as humans, should rise with the sun and sleep when we're tired. This is rarely possible when you have any kind of work schedule outside your home. I read about a place that incorporates naps into the workday. Like kindergarten. Sounds great!
The earliest I can remember having to wake up for a job was when I was working in the cafeteria at Emanuel hospital as a temp, hoping to become a regular employee (they paid well above minimum wage, as it was a union job). I had to wake up at 3:30 am, I think? To get ready and be there by 4:15. I was training to be a sub so it was part of a two-week rotation for all the different kitchen positions, and that was the one where you had to cook all the bacon, so it was the earliest arrival time. This was the most difficult to get up for and I was only saved by the fairly robotic functions of the position, and the pretty early quit time. But it was really impossible to make myself get to bed in time to make sure I got a reasonable amount of rest the night before. I'll tell some more stories from there later...
Very Similar to the Hospital Cafeteria
The next earliest wake up I can remember was at Walmart, just a couple years ago, when they wanted me to try and train in the baking department. Even though everything you were baking was frozen, there was a lot to make, and the start time was 5:15 am. The gal I trained with was amazing. She knew sign language and was in alcohol recovery, and had a great sense of humor. She had terrible back problems and crappy health insurance though and was making barely any money especially considering how hard she worked. Supposedly Walmart will raise its minimum wage starting pay to $10 an hour soon, but you still cannot live on that. I wished I could continue to work with her, but when given the choice, cashiering was better because of the hours. I rode my bike there as often as I could, which took almost an hour, but mostly bike paths, and I didn't want to do that so early.
So when I started at
the high school last year and the hours were supposedly 7:15 until 2:45 I was okay with it. It was doable. It was reasonable. It was expected to work school hours at a school! I'm not a 'morning person' but I am not grumpy or anything, I just prefer to stay up late and wake up late. I have worked swing shift hours in retail, late nights in restaurant/bars, and other sporadic part time hours at different jobs. At the senior apartments, I worked in their fine dining restaurant (full table set up and tie and dress shirt) and I had to do split shift every day because they didn't have many customers for lunch. So I went there from 7-11 and 4-8. Sometimes not even both. The manager was terrible at scheduling and the shifts could be erratic. A few times I got to work the 'day shift' for the regular gal who took a vacation. Her mom also worked there as a housekeeper. The day shift was 7-2, breakfast and lunch service, doing laundry (tablecloths, napkins, and aprons), sometimes room service, and other cleaning and prep work like vacuuming and napkin folding.
I liked it, you were on your own a lot and it was pretty peaceful but there was no way I was getting her job, she loved it too. It was pretty easy. The only thing lacking was tips. The money was sh*t and tips would have helped a lot. Everything was prepaid so there was no money to deal with, which was an aspect I liked a lot after being fired from OMSI 'science store' (ie gift shop!) for letting a deposit bag out of my sight for two minutes. Nothing happened to it, but they weren't happy about it, or me in general, so that job was way more stressful than it should have been, and after that experience I just wanted something that was a little fun with little to no money handling. I will for sure tell more stories later from both these jobs. They would have been great if I could have recorded them at the time, but I'm sure I'll remember some things, just not some of the sparkling conversation gems...maybe it will come back to me if I write about it in greater detail...
It's absolutely tried, tested and proven that sleep
deprivation is BAD for your health & stresses u out.
The problem with 7:15-2:45
was that it turned out to be 6:15 to 3:30. Sometimes longer. Because they needed me to be a bus aide. Supposedly no one else could do it since I ended up doing it every day until Spring Break when I transferred classrooms. I was actually prepared for something like this because it was mentioned in my interview, however, they gave me the impression it would be an occasional job and not a regular thing. I think they knew how it was supposed to be and my class was the one who fucked up with that. So I had to wake up at five to drive to the person's house, ride the school bus with them, and ride home with them, then drive myself home. Talk about a pain in the butt. For so many reasons. Like you don't get paid for the driving time. And just all the sitting. I missed riding my bike and also gained a lot of weight. I'll rant about this later. And then I discovered (when one of the other bus aides who got on the bus about halfway to school told me) when I finally asked why they had different people all the time, that their class rotated people to be bus aides so that the same person didn't have to do it every day! They switched about every two or three weeks. So logical. So nice!
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