Life In The Fast Lane

The grass is greener where you water it.

Work has been keeping me busy as I continue to adjust to working night shifts. It's great but it's also hard work because it forced me to learn how to cope with staying awake when my body tells me I need to be asleep. It has gotten easier over the last few weeks, as I've been making sure that I get enough sleep when I'm off. Often I've ended up sleeping up to sixteen hours straight once I've come off a set of night shifts because my body is so sleep deprived. I can't write a lot about work, due to my contract, but night shifts are very different depending on what part of the building I'm working with and the type of residents I'm working with. Some are really easy to work with, but others are more challenging. One of the things I'm really grateful for is the fact that we get our hour's break during the night. Here in the UK, you get an hour's break if you've been working longer than ten hours so we get our breaks after midnight. Often I've sat in one of the lounges, with the TV on, though I don't always end up watching whatever I've put on the TV. Its background noise whilst I'm chilling and drinking my coffee. That's the survival juice of the night shift worker. Before I got this job, I was cutting back on my caffeine intake, but once I started working in care I began to drink a lot more of the stuff. I also stopping turning my nose up at instant coffee. I've begun to enjoy the stuff, often because I can't be asked to take my french press into work with me. It's down to the risk of breaking the french press and sometimes I'll make a cup of coffee and I'll take me an hour and a half to get back to it, because of how busy the shift might be.

I've also been learning the various superstitions of working in a care home. One of these superstitions is that if you say that you hope that the shift goes well, or that you mention that the shift is going well, then you basically jinx the shift. After accidentally jinxing one shift I've been on, I'm not going down that path again. I'm not big on the whole thing of believing in superstitions, I want to respect my colleagues' belief that you can accidentally jinx the whole shift by accidentally commenting on how well the shift was going, or if you wish the next shift a good one. You're better to tell the next shift to "break a leg" as you would say to a stage actor before they take to the stage for a show.

This might not be something that you'd find rather interesting to know of, but is big news for me. About ten days ago, the light bulb in the lounge went. I had some spare bulbs in the kitchen so I changed the light bulb. For some, this might be something that they could do without batting an eyelid. However, it's not something I've ever had to deal with on my own. So I scrambled up my little step ladder (bought as an aid for my lack of hight), and somehow managed to unscrew the old bulb and pop the new one in. It did make me miss having Andy about. He's away with work, the type of work I can't write about on here.

Until next time!