Hello, I Am The Moon

The nightshift. Grafting under the stars.
I'm working nights this week. It is now 4:41. I've missed a nights sleep, but am still going along quite strongly, powered on a vegetarian cottage pie and about two litres of orange juice. At about 10am my blood sugar level will crash and I'll wake with a start. I'll want some fizzy goodness to take away the craving. I'll go and retrieve the charcoal elixir living in the fridge and stop to pause at the TV. I'll not return to bed, and a week of sleep deprivation will start.
Nights actually has various positives and negatives. I shall list the major ones…

Positives

1. The money. The shift cash is rather nice, especially if you get in before 8:30. Then you get time and two-thirds. For reading the paper. Haha, not really Mr.BAe spies, I was doing quality graft at 6:30 yesterday evening. I still am now chief. I've made eight planes tonight.
2. There are only two of us here, me and my friend Chris. I don't exactly feel like I'm being pushed into over exertion.
3. Cricket. We time our nightshift on a week when there is a test match on the Thursday. It means that we get to watch the first two days play. Yay! I loves the cricket. It does however mean that on the last night I am even more knackered than I usually would be.

Negatives

1. Lack of sleep. As I mentioned, I've totally missed a nights sleep. Most people sleep before they come to work but I can't fool my body. It doesn't want to sleep on Monday afternoon, it had enough of that dull nonsense on Sunday night thank you very much. I'll sleep anything from between 3 to 6 hours when I get home and that will repeat until Friday. Then I'll either move swiftly back to normality, or I'll spend the whole weekend in a zombie like trance. I quite like the feeling of sleepiness when you have nowhere to rush off to. I don't particularly like the thankfully rare occasions when lack of sleep sends my already high grumpiness level off the scale. I've sat at work before wanting to kill anyone who even talks to me. If bad vibes could kill, I'd have murdered millions on a night shift. For nothing. I've actually frightened myself.
2. The rig. Our testing rig is a strange place. It's a large room filled with various test benches, electrical cabinets and wiring units, and with lots of nooks and crannies where murderers could hide. It's okay on days when it's filled with people, but I just cobbled together a new set of Nimrod software and went down there to load it onto the computers. Now, it didn't help that there was a thick fog on the way there, and all I could hear in the grey murkiness was the occasional sound of a spanner being dropped or metal hitting metal from the nearby hangars. The rig though was pitch black. I turned the lights on, but as you load your software, you can't help but feel that this would be the perfect place to sneak up on somebody. The soonest I'd know that a psycho had crept in would be when a pickaxe was lodged through my head, making its exit through my right eye socket. It'd be too late for me to realise that it wasn't the sound of the hangars at all that I was hearing earlier, no, it was the sound of the psychopathic escapee's pickaxe being dragged along the ground. It's odd though, because a few times something caught the corner of my eye. If you don't hear from me again this week, call the cops and tell them that I've been deaded by Pickaxe Pete.
3. My mind is dying. I'm finding this very hard to write and I can't fathom why some of my tests are failing tonight. I feel my IQ has dropped to the level of a punctured dinghy.