I wrote about my job as an overnight studio engineer in Part XIII. Living the life of an overnighter — a brutal existence — is today’s topic.

There is a certain antisocial nature to working overnights in radio. Most, if not all of the gig, is worked alone. To an extent, a person starts getting used to that. At home during the day, one sleeps while the world awakes and goes about its activities. In my experience, it’s not a healthy existence. Social contact is important, but it is so limited for an overnighter. As a colleague of mine once said, overnights is a single man’s game. I actually knew of people whose marriages suffered because of the spouse’s graveyard job.

There’s also the complete disruption of circadian rhythms that takes place, which has been linked to obesity, diabetes and depression. I certainly had some struggles with the latter: I worked in a small town where I didn’t know anyone other than my co-workers, and there were few opportunities to meet new people. Gray, dark, rainy and windy were the seasons, and when there was sunshine I slept through it. No fun!

I employed various strategies to improve how I felt. I purchased a full spectrum light bulb that mimicked the sun. Unfortunately it was expensive and a poor substitute for natural light. I tried staying up a little while after getting home in the morning and also attempted going to bed as soon as possible after arriving home — getting to sleep before it got too light outside. Ultimately, the latter worked better. Finally, I reversed my meals, having dinner food when I got home from work in the morning and breakfast food at night. That didn’t work at all! Cheerios before bed in the morning was a lot better than pot roast prior to a daylong snooze.

A problem overnighters face during those day sleeps is the rest of the world working. The biggest irritations I had were apartment inspectors coming in during the day to check appliances and fire detection equipment and maintenance workers sawing through drywall in the common hallway to work on plumbing — noise that could wake the dead. Never mind the sign on my door reading, “Day sleeper. Please don’t disturb.”

I worked the overnight job from March 1995 until early 1996. There was one week in August where temperatures got into the 90s during an extraordinary Oregon Coast heat wave. The average temperature that time of year is 58 degrees, with the high average being 65. It made sleeping in a stuffy apartment difficult, and the high humidity didn’t help. One thing I did enjoy, though, was going to the beach after work. I liked standing in tide pools because they were so warm. That’s unheard of on the coast.

The truth is that I never really adjusted to graveyard. I tried lots of trickery, but my body knew what was going on. I just slipped into an existence of perpetual jet lag and was alone most of the time. My friend and colleague, Cindy, implored me to get involved in the community when I wasn’t sleeping. I loved lighthouses, and became a member of the Oregon Chapter of the United States Lighthouse Society. The problem was that I was the youngest member by at least a decade or more.

The best thing that happened to me was getting promoted to production director, which came about in a sad way that I’ll detail in a later post. The promotion with improved hours certainly changed my disposition and kickstarted my upward career trajectory at KSND.

More to come in Part XV…