I have found the secret to working mids (for me anyway) is staying up late on days off. We work 2200-0600hrs. On my days off I usually stay up to 0300. Seems to help. Kids and wife are in bed and you can get a lot of gun maintenance and reloading done.

I have just come to terms with the fact I have to deal with 5-6 hours of sleep and just being tired.

I work day shift, have no life, and have not slept the whole night through more than two nights in a row in coming up on 6 years now.

My secret is to take a benedryl and sleep up to 8 or 9 hours after the evening is finished. Flying nights is tough, nothing to look at other than radar occasionally, radios super quiet and let the auto pilot do the enroute stuff. As a freight dog it paid the bills and put the kids through college. Flying forest fires in the Bell 212's during in Alaska again at night (Twilight really) was a good change.

I can sleep like a baby when I don't have stuff going on. Yesterday was my first day without the kiddos in a while, slept 10 GLORIOUS hours. Woke up motivated and cleared out a mess of admin stuff I'd been putting off because I was too dang tired and busy the last several nights.

I work tonight and then have Wednesday off...then teaching 8:30-4:30 Thursday and 7:30-4:30 Friday. That will be "fun".

Off Saturday and then back to the grind with the kiddos here.

I did 7.5 years on nights. Thought I liked it until I worked days. Never. Going. Back.

friend (not LEO) works for a oil/gas company,
he works a rotating shift,

it is tough for him since he got married,
his wife works M-F 7-4 office work,

I am not sure of the rotation, but basically 4-5 days, a few off, 4-5 mids (4-12) and a few off, then overnights, ,

all worked so they supposedly get a 3 day weekend every month or so,

he just hit 50 and it is starting to wear on him a bit,


had a neighbor when I was a teenager that had a similar shift with Dupont, and he seemed to have no issues with it

quote:

I am not sure of the rotation, but basically 4-5 days, a few off, 4-5 mids (4-12) and a few off, then overnights, ,

I don't understand why companies do that. That would kill me...or any normal person, I'd imagine. The one saving grace of night shift is that at least it's (usually) consistently nights, and you can adapt your schedule to it. If they switched you around every few days, the body never gets time to adjust. And I don't understand what they accomplish by rotating people around like that that they couldn't accomplish with fixed shifts.

Having worked nearly every shift that you could imagine, I hated midnights the most.
At one place it was 7pm - 7am.
Another one was your basic 11pm 7am.
The worst was a 10 hour shift that was from 2pm - 12am. It turned into 2pm to like 3am or later some times. I was salary and hated it.
Sleep when you can I guess.

Yep, did midnights and afternoons for most of my career.
I had no choice.