It’s a dirty job, working third shift, no matter what job you’re doing.

You’re opposite from the rest of the working world. You’re trying to sleep while everyone’s up and about, running their leaf blowers outside your window and letting their dogs bark. Normal people don’t get so much of the lawn equipment noise at 2 AM, but your dead of night is fair game. You can’t exactly go run errands when you’re awake, because things like the Post Office close at five, right when you’re getting up.

You’re opposite from your family too. Juggling kids is really challenging, and forget about sleeping with your spouse. The rest of the family needs to adjust to, to learn to be quiet while Daddy’s sleeping. There is no vacuuming during the day; the noisy stuff is saved for the rare evening time when you’re both up.

Your body gets jacked up, especially when you’re trying to adapt to the changes. If you happen to work a four-day week, you get a little more time during the day, but only because you shift your sleeping schedule back and forth weekly. That often leads to 24 hours awake at a time, weekly, and that’s no good for your system. You’re always tired, always trying to catch up on sleep, and never quite making it. You have to learn to deal with being a zombie, and so does your family.

In the winter, you never see the sun, even more than the typical office drone. It’s dark at five when you wake up, it’s dark for your whole workday, and in this valley, it’s foggy on your commute home at 8 AM. The sun peeks out around three in the afternoon, but you’re not there to see it. It gets depressing.

Everyone else in the world works one calendar day at a time, but not you. Your workday spans two. So you technically get three days off a week, but you work early in the morning on the first one and in the evening on the last one. You feel shortchanged.

There are a few good things about the shift too; the peace at work, the more relaxed working environment, but they don’t balance out the downsides. It’s not a desirable shift by any means. And you do at least get dinner with your family, even if it’s your breakfast. You didn’t get that on second shift, not with having to go to work in the early afternoon.

But you do what you have to do. You put in your hours on the lousy shift and do your time waiting for a better one to open. You pay your dues. And maybe, in ten or fifteen years if you’re lucky, you’ll get to climb all the way up to first shift and rejoin the rest of the world.