---------------Working Again – Week One – Oct. 15----------------------
I have joined the ranks of the employed again. I started my job at LLBean this week. I’m working the night shift and it is already clear that that’s going to take a lot of getting used to. I am just working until the holidays to help them through the peak season. I’ll be filling orders in the warehouse. My official title is ‘OFC picker’. So I moved cross-country to get a seasonal job as a picker – guess that makes me a migrant worker. I am going through training this week and only working five hours a night. Next week will be six and then full time. Hopefully by then I’ll have the sleeping-during-the-day thing down. Starting Thursday (10/18) I will start another job at a local school working half days in the morning, yeah that’ll really help the sleeping situation. There is a first grader that has the occasional meltdown and in extreme cases bolts from the school. Apparently they think this is unusual; they clearly didn’t work at my old school. Anyway, I will be helping out in the class and subtly keeping an eye on him until they can get him tested and a plan put together (5-6 weeks). Basically, I’m babysitting. Let’s see, picking and babysitting – maybe I should get a weekend job washing dishes to round out my resume. I’m so glad I got my masters.
The hardest thing about working the graveyard shift is getting your body used to different sleep patterns, duh. Training your body to adjust to a different schedule can be daunting. I took a nap before the first night of work but along about 1:00 I started getting the yawns. The guys doing that part of the training presentation seemed awkward enough without some clown yawning every five seconds. I did my best to stifle them but everyone knows that just makes it more obvious; the face contortions give you away. The ironic thing about all this is I used to have such a hard time staying awake in the afternoon. Come 3:00 PM I’d be craving a nap. Now that I’m trying to sleep in the afternoon I can’t – I get all snug in my bed and spend hours trying to talk myself into relaxing and drifting off.
What is less obvious is the second hardest thing about working nights – figuring out what meal you’re eating. If I sleep in the afternoon and have something to eat before work is that breakfast or dinner? Should I be eating a bowl of Cheerios or chicken and rice? It all gets very confusing. On one hand, it is the start of my day; on the other, 8:30pm is more like dinnertime. Lunch is a whole other conundrum. Is lunch at 2:00 in the morning when I have my break? Is it when I get home at 5:00 AM before I take my nap? Lunch comes between breakfast and dinner but on this schedule I’ll most likely be eating between the two meals on both sides, between breakfast and dinner and between dinner and breakfast. I’m actually considering writing out my schedule to help me figure out what and when to eat and when to sleep. Then just hope my body will cooperate and be hungry and tired at the appointed times. Sounds reasonable, no?
------------------Week Two----------------------
It’s nine o’clock in the evening. I have had dinner, watched a little TV, brushed and flossed my teeth and soon I’ll be going to work. What’s wrong with this picture? I’m supposed to be going to bed! This is turning out to be like getting up and going to work twice a day. So even though it is only Monday evening, I’m about to head to work for the third time this week. Shouldn’t it be Wednesday then? This schedule is going to be tough. I’ll get 2-3 hours sleep between LLBean and school, then try and take a couple naps between school and back at LLBean. I can’t seem to sleep more than an hour or so at a time in the afternoon and evening.
This can’t be good but there are a few bright spots. First, LLBean is a little slow right now, or I should say they’re at a normal level of activity. They hire for the holidays early so everyone will be up to speed when the holiday crunch starts, around Thanksgiving. Between now and then they won’t need everybody they’ve hired so we’ll probably get one night off a week. I won’t get paid for that night but catching up on sleep will be worth it. Second, I was slated to work a full shift, 10:00-6:30, but requested to change that to a six-hour shift, 10:00-4:00, instead and they were amenable to that. The two and a half hours in the early morning is the best sleep I get. Third, the school gets the entire week of Thanksgiving off so I’ll only have one job for those few days. Finally, both jobs will be over by Christmas and I can go back to being a bum.
The downside to all that is come the New Year I start the job hunt all over again. Hopefully, I’ll do well at the school and get myself on the preferred sub list, but that won’t be enough to make ends meet. The teacher in the room I’m helping in is pregnant so I’m hoping to have a shot at a long-term sub position, we’ll see. I have started working with a career counselor and hope to have a better vision of what I want the future to look like. I have a million thoughts and ideas floating through my head and he has been very instrumental in helping me organize and analyze them. He is a full psychologist so he is able to go beyond administering an interest inventory and will help me discover what I really want to be when, and if, I grow up.
-------------------A few weeks later-------------------------------------------
I’m kind of getting the routine down. I can sleep better in the afternoons but I’m still not getting enough sleep. Fortunately, neither job is too taxing on the brain so it’s ok that I’m a little fuzzy-headed much of the time. LLBean has been giving everyone a night off each week. Luckily, my night is Thursday-into-Friday, or Day 5 as we call it (it gets too confusing to say Monday, Tuesday, etc.) so it’s like a three-day weekend, except for the other job. The schedule doesn’t leave much time for anything else; going to the gym and eating seems to fill the rest of my waking hours. I’m embarrassed that it took me so long to get back to writing. My appreciation of the weekends had increased tenfold. I’ll never get used to the getting up and going to work twice a day but now that we’re into November I can start counting the weeks down until it’s over. Kind of like the month of May when I was teaching.
Crazy as this all sounds – working with the councilor and the two drastically different jobs have given me a lot of insight as to what makes me tick. I love working with kids but I also like having projects with specific outcomes. I like the feeling of completing a task and having a finished product to look at. Chasing the kids out the door in June doesn’t quite give me that sense of accomplishment. The LLBean job does have specific tasks though the finished product is a hopper full of goods that I dump down a conveyor belt. It is nice to have that feeling of completion at the end of the day (or night in this case) but it’s not too impressive of a product. I am working on my times, which are monitored, and trying to get my numbers up so that adds some motivation. I started out very slow but am picking up – probably just over-thinking the process. Tomorrow I take the postal service exam. Unfortunately, I’ll only get an hour or so of sleep before hand but I’ll give it my best shot. Not sure if that’s exactly what I’m looking for but there are aspects of it that I think I would enjoy. I can’t help but think about those umpteen years of college gone to waste but, hey, it’s all part of the journey.
And that’s exactly what moving to Maine has been: a journey of self-discovery. The child I work with has similar issues that I had at his age. He and I have bonded well and it’s interesting to watch him and think about my own issues with anxiety. The LLBean job has made me think that I might be more inclined towards a blue-collar line of work, or at least opened it up as a consideration. The people of Maine are very modest and self-sufficient almost to a fault. People don’t seem to judge you for what you do (I think half the population has worked for Bean at some point) or if you hold two jobs. You do what you have to to get by and that’s respected here. I will use that as an example and try not to worry about what others think. The councilor has helped me wrap all these things together plus revisit events in the past that I had never really resolved. It’s amazing to me how everything is fitting together. I could thank my lucky stars, and I do, but I think it is more about going with instinct and being the right time in my life for this kind of reflection.
I don’t know if I’ll stay in Maine – I kind of suspect not. But I’m glad to be here for now and I think it will impact my happiness wherever I end up. Keeping that in mind makes the crazy schedule and the distance from friends more bearable. One of my travel goals was to experience a New England fall and now I have that under my belt. So far, I haven’t even minded the cold. I walk a lot at Bean so I like to wear shorts. Last night it was 27 degrees and I was walking to my car in my shorts and not feeling that cold – I guess I haven’t completely lost touch with my northern roots – I did have a warm jacket on in case you’re wondering. While I’m here I need to spend a night in Rhode Island and Connecticut then I’ll only have a handful of states that I haven’t visited for a night or longer. I enjoy working but have realized I want to spend more time reading (books without pictures), writing and hiking. So I’m not sure what the future holds which is both exciting and scary. I have a hunch December and April will be big months for me. In December, the jobs will end and I’ll head back to CA for the holidays. I’m curious to see how that will feel. I’ve chosen April as the time when I need to make more permanent decisions. I’m not exactly sure why April though part of it has to do with financial considerations. We’ll see how that plays out – I’ll let you know.
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