10/12/04’s illustrious band:

Executive Perks

Brought to you by the night shift.

I’ve had two night-shift jobs in my life. The first was during college, when I worked 11 to 7 at a convenience store on Main Street in Vermillion, SD. I got the job because I knew kung fu, or thought I did, and the proprietors wanted someone who could defend him/herself in the event of an outbreak of drunken frat boys. (My skills were never tested, thank god, because I realize now that they were very meager indeed.) I didn’t mind the hours too much because I only had to do it once or twice a week -- no problem for a 20-something college student. It was a pretty quiet shift; I had plenty of time to sweep, mop, and refill the ice machine, and I was out of there by the time the candy-stealing grade schoolers came in.

So when I left the Slap Factory four or so years later and was offered another nocturnal job, I figured it would be no problem. I’d always been a night owl, after all, and working the night shift meant a whopping $.75/hour more than day shifters got. Show me the money! I leapt at the opportunity. After the Slap Factory, wouldn’t you?

The company was a financial services printer, and the job was proofreading. Oh, the excitement! There we were at 3:00 a.m., poring over quarterly reports and initial public offerings and the like, searching for tiny deviances in the dense legal language that could mean a difference of skillions of dollars (or so they told us). I drank a lot of diet Dr. Pepper. A lot. I can no longer stand the stuff, and not just because the Nutrasweet makes my face break out in an itchy red rash.

I learned some scary things at that job. Perhaps the worst was the salaries “earned” by the executives of the companies who sent us their reports to print. It was not uncommon to see a base salary of $999,900/year, with perks and benefits that easily totaled another $1,000,000 or more. My cohorts and I were making around $25,000/year with no perks -- not even free coffee. As a fellow proofreader put it, “If that job didn’t turn you into a raging socialist, at least for a little while, you really weren’t paying attention.”

Other scary truths revealed in the dead of night:

• The more of an a$$ you are, the greater your chances of success. There was one customer service rep who, when he called the proofing/typesetting team about changes to clients’ documents, was so abusive that he routinely reduced strong adults of both sexes to tears. People would answer the phone with false names when they suspected it was him, put him on hold, and go on break to avoid his tirades. He was and remains one of the two most vile individuals I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with. Last I heard, both of them had been praised and promoted. NOT a pleasant lesson for someone just getting her feet wet in the corporate cesspool!

  
  

• No competence required. There was one typesetter on our team who had such a bad case of ADHD that he literally could not stay in his seat some nights, which meant that (A) he did not get his work done and (B) he was walking around preventing everyone else from getting theirs done, too. When he did work, he made up his own coding system and disregarded changes if he didn’t think they really needed to be made. As far as I know, he was given neither help nor reprimand.

  
  

• Nighttime is weirdtime. Our team leader Ed was a nutcase on the loose. He was a crew-cut National Guard Reservist who liked to run his team “like a little platoon.” No one would have minded a little military efficiency, but Ed also prided himself on his ability to go without sleep, or much of it, for extended periods of time. He routinely bragged about working 14 hours at the office, then spending the next 8 on other wakeful tasks and sleeping for just 2 -- for several weeks in a row. This lead to disordered thinking, paranoia, and a strong suspicion that Ed lived in his car because his girlfriend had kicked him out of their apartment for knocking her around. Ed also liked to ask, during performance reviews, “Who do you think should be cut from the team? We need to get rid of the deadweight around here.” And he wouldn’t let up until you gave him a name. Last report: Ed was still in charge of Team A.

  
  

• Sleeping during the day just doesn’t work. Sure, I tried. We all did. Ear plugs, eye shades, blackout curtains, silenced phone ringers, the works. I was even more successful at it than most of my coworkers, having neither partner nor children to interrupt my attempts. Still, I got 6 or so hours of fitful grey doze per 24, and it was not sufficient. It made me strange. I had no friends and no social life, because the rest of the world was asleep when I was up, so my focus narrowed to just a few things: work, the gym, counting fat grams, taping and watching The X-Files, reading a Sherlock Holmes bulletin board online, and worrying about sleep. I was thin, but pissed off about it. When I realized that I was abusing cough medicine to help me get to sleep, I applied for a day job immediately. My family pointed out the differences in my attitude and behavior within a week of the switch.

  
  

• Further proof of impaired judgment: I met my future ex-husband while on this job and actually thought it was a good idea to go out with him. GAH!!

  
  

Summary: Thank goodness for the day shift here at Media HQ! Good people, plenty of sunlight, and I haven’t dated a single coworker. I can’t even complain about the stuffed musk ox in the lobby . . . much.

Today around the world: October 12 is Hispanity Day in Spain.

E-mail the Media Sensation: BandNameoftheDay@hotmail.com

Visit the BND archives at http://jugglernaut.blogspot.com.