Creatures of the night

I’ve been doing shift work (well some studying and both field and office work in between) since 2000 now, almost 7 years. Since day one I’ve always loved doing it.

Morning shift is what everyone else is doing and it feels quite boring.Everyone sits in the same traffic every morning and afternoon, spend the same time at work, go to the same supermarkets on their way home, cooks dinner and spends the evening in front of the TV before going to bed. Guess what happens tomorrow?

Ok, that was a small exaggeration. My/Our life are a bit more exciting than that when I do the morning shift, hopefully yours are too.

Evening shifts are the social life killer. You work when everybody else are not working and when they work you are not working, well at least you sleep the same time.

For some odd reason I like the night shift or as it is popularly called the graveyard shift. The world is a different place at night. Although I don’t see much of the real world since I spend most of my night shift in the control room. And even if I was the city is fairly dead this time of night.

I’m talking more about the net. People that are online this time are usually other graveyard workers, night owls or from some other part of the world (where it is daytime now). They are different in a good sense.

I don’t know quite how to explain it. But if you look to the animal kingdom nocturnal animals are different. Their senses are sharper and their awareness of the world around them are far greater. They live in a world of darkness, a darkness that can be a friend or foe. They have to be on top of their senses in order to survive in the darkness.

Although mankind’s survivability doesn’t depend on our ability to sharpen our senses when night falls I think that is exactly what happens. It wasn’t that many millenniums ago that mankind fought on the same levels as wolves. We were more intelligent but being on top of the food chain means you got to produce results, not think about the meaning of life.

Well we have evolved since then. Not genetically, we still have basically the same genes as the first cavemen that started painting in their caves. Evolution is about survival of the fittest and our culture isn’t old enough to have started making any significant changes in the human gene pool.

But the old traits from whatever nocturnal ancestors we have are still in our genes and the crowds that hang here at night are more awake than any of the people that hang here during the daytime. A paradox yes but people are fascinating when they are on top of their senses…