Overnight Train

I work overnight. A night shift. But I'm not a steelworker or a security guard. I'm a thirty-year-old married Caucasian woman; I work a normal, white-collar job and hold two college degrees. My job title is "Analyst," but it could be "Network Supervisor," "Team Lead," "Account Executive" or any other vague, undescriptive moniker.

This is the new world we live in, the one our parents don't understand, the one where our employers consider us commodities and we offer no loyalty to our employers. Displays of loyalty are met with, at best, distrust. We consider ourselves lucky to hold a steady job, and our employers often take advantage of that gratitude with a myriad of tiny degradations. But I don't intend to catalogue my sardonic mental gymnastics with respect to neo-corporate evolution.

When you work at night and sleep during the day, your perspective shifts. You operate under different social rules, and I suspect there's a growing population of us, the "creatively scheduled," wandering around at 7:30 on a Saturday morning.

How do we cope with our displacement? Previously, we joined friends for 5 pm happy hours, slept late on weekends, hustled through endless am rush hour commutes, watched two hours of "must-see tv" at 7 and 8 pm, maybe even carpooled or used public transportation. Much of the normal American lifestyle is beyond my reach, at least in it's unadulterated form. I now know which bars sell food until 4 am, which bagel shops open at 5 am, where the 24-hour grocery stores are, and which of my neighbors are unemployed and making unjustified, unruly, unrelenting noise at noon on a Thursday. A girl's got to sleep, after all.

Life turned literally back-to-front presents challenges and unexpected windfalls. For example, at 11:30 pm, when I'm commuting to work, it takes me less than 20 minutes, less than half the normal time. All I have to do is slalom past the occasional drunk driver (why are they always, regardless of weekday, drunk drivers? Have we lost the moral sanction of the 90's?), and I'm sitting at my silent, fluorescently lit desk.