When I was in college I worked the midnight shift at a grocery store for a summer. It was a tough schedule because I kept my job at Sears and would work there during the day.
Then the summer brought seven straight midnight shifts at the grocery store and then seven nights off from the grocery store. During the week that I was on during the midnight shift, I was a zombie. I would sleep whenever I could.
I would fall asleep in the car at school even more easily than I did before I started that job. And I was just soooo tired.
I also saw a lot of things in the middle of the night that a lot of people don't hardly ever see.
They may hear about them and nowadays they would joke that that's what they do at Walmart, but this was a grocery store.
I remember this guy came in with two women and they were all pretty far up there on the imbibing of alcohol range. It was after midnight or after two if I remember right. So I wasn't legally allowed to sell them wine or beer, but they convinced me to do it anyways and I got in trouble the next day. Another time police officers came in and they just made a little pass through the store walking around looking for people and seen what was going on.
I remember there was a Miss Pac -Man game in the front of the store, and I would play Miss Pac-Man a couple of times, a shift just trying to keep myself awake.
The cleaning crew would come in in the middle of the night and they would polish the floors and sweep and do all the things that they had to do.
One of them was this short, really muscular guy that really was ripped, but he couldn't make sense when you talked to him. The other worker was a metalhead that loved to talk about Sledge and who the original rock artist was that did all the songs that Quiet Riot did, and he would argue with me about music that I really didn't care about. But it was fun. And then the boss would get them started and then he'd disappear for two hours and then he'd show back up and They'd clean up and put everything away.
That was a tough summer, but I did learn to dislike midnight shifts so that when I was in my career, I really hated working midnight shifts the way I had to.
But then it was only one midnight shift a week and only every two or three weeks and so it wasn't too bad.
Now I don't do shift work at all and I am very pleased with that.
What an adventure!
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