Tag Archives: graveyard shift

A New Normal

Posted on by

“Heart Attack Clarke.” That’s the nickname a friend at work gave me recently. Fortunately, it has nothing to do with my cardiovascular system or stress levels. Rather, it marks a change of attitude following a very difficult year.

During the spring of 2012 I abruptly transitioned onto the graveyard shift, and the major change in hours put a strain on both my marriage and health. My wife and I worked within the parameters as best as we could. Physically, though, I was exhausted most of the time, and weekends left me feeling jet-lagged. Melatonin quickly became my friend, as did the couch.

The collateral damage in all of this included household projects and spending time with friends. Other than playing on my soccer team, I wasn’t hanging out with people all that much. Being on an opposite schedule and fighting fatigue didn’t leave me a whole lot of energy for socializing.

Then, something remarkable happened. My schedule changed significantly for the better a month ago. I’m back on days with new duties and the opportunity to work closely with some folks I really respect. Couple that with being around people again on a daily basis, and I’m one happy employee!

Getting sleep, enjoying the long daylight hours of early summer, and rediscovering gratitude for being alive led to my new nickname. My friend was reminded of heart attack victims who almost die but come back from the brink with a new lease on life. While it certainly wasn’t a near-death experience, working graveyard did kill my joy. Although I never want to live through anything like it again, I’m grateful for the new outlook that has been produced.

These days I’m making up for lost time. Household projects I couldn’t be bothered with are completed. Plants are planted. Windows are washed. Home thermostats are installed. My wife and I attend events. My workouts are better. Everyone gets a smile and a hello in the halls at work as though I hadn’t seen them in a year, which of course is true! Yep, I’m back, and my family has also taken notice — glad their husband and son is living again and not just existing until his next nap.

All of this good news does mean I’m a little behind in updating this blog. I’ve still got multiple chapters to write in both the Newport Tales and Trials, Joys and Life Lessons With Fish Tacos series. They haven’t been forgotten, and I will get back to them in the near-term. But, you’ll have to excuse me for now as the patio garden, the summer sun, and my wife need my attention. Life is good…

Newport Tales – Part XIV

Posted on by

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…

Newport Tales – Part XIII

Posted on by

As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, Newport has an emotional tug for me. A lot of interesting things happened during my five years on the Oregon Coast. One area where I really struggled was the overnight shift, which was my permanent position once KSND was on the air in March of 1995.

While it’s really not the case anymore, back then a radio rookie usually started his full-time career in overnights. Mistakes could be made there without any serious repercussions while the broadcaster worked on his craft. It was all a part of paying one’s dues.

My solo shift was 9:00 pm to 5:00 am Monday through Saturday, eventually changing to Sunday through Friday once we hired weekend part-timers. In the early days there wasn’t much to do. I changed reel-to-reel tapes on the Schafer 903E automation, recorded the nightly weather forecast, altered the witticisms on the outdoor reader board, cleaned the tape machine heads, and programmed the sequential electronic memory on the automation. Exciting stuff.

Sunday nights I had a lot of time to do maintenance cleaning of the equipment while we ran a syndicated ambient electronica show called, Musical Starstreams, on digital audio tape. The music was a vast departure from what we normally played, and the host, Forest, always sounded as though he had been hitting the waterpipe all week. Weird stuff. The show ran from 10:00 pm to midnight.

I also spent some time writing commercials and handling minor production recording duties. While this eventually became a full-time job, in the early days there wasn’t a lot of that work to do. The only other major duty I had was restarting the music rotations at 3:00 am. This kept songs from playing at the same times each day and week.

Overnights did have its odd charms. While larger market stations got calls during the night, we received very few. A stranger one that I remember was a construction worker calling me around midnight and again at 2:00 am to see if I’d dedicate a song to his ex-girlfriend. She lived in Idaho, so I don’t know how this was supposed to help, but he was nice enough — really talkative for that late at night. I had nothing else pressing to do so we chatted. He liked his Journey songs, but Open Arms seemed a silly request since it was his former girlfriend we were talking about.

Some moments I didn’t appreciate as much. Our studio was in a former bank building. On occasion someone would use the drive-through window area as a turnaround, which would trip the alert bell. That always spooked me when it happened in the middle of the night. I’d open the studio door a crack — peeking out to make sure a car wasn’t just sitting there. The window glass was bulletproof, but still!

The melancholy kicked in while watching the laundromat across the street close at night. The owner would come by and clean the building. Once he left, that’s when I felt most alone. A few cars and big rigs would pass by on Highway 101, but it was fairly quiet in that part of town. That’s when I’d wonder if I’d ever get off the overnight shift.

More to come in Part XIV…