(Not) workin' nine to fiiiive

I like reading Terry Pratchett's books, but I sometimes wonder if he's ever done a night shift. Some of my favourite characters work nights: Sam Vimes (in the Night Watch) and Glenda Sugarbean (in charge of the Night Kitchen at Unseen University), and Pratchett makes it sound wonderful, exciting and with its own unique glamour. Unfortunately, in my experience, it's nothing like that.

Nights are disorientating, confusing to the digestive system, and no matter how much sleep you manage to get during the day, exhausting. That's not to say there aren't good bits. I like having the ladies loos pretty much to myself. I can go in and stretch and pretend to be a ballerina (there's a full-length mirror and the sinks are about barre-height, I think), without worrying that someone from accounts will walk in and freak out. In the top trumps of employment, working nights usually wins in the hardship stakes, now that there aren't any chimney sweeps or workhouses. It also means you can look at your fellow commuters on the early morning train with a certain air of weary superiority. And, on slow nights, although I don't think we're really supposed to, you can catch up on all the TV you missed during the week.

It can get really spooky though. We work on the ground floor of a large five-storey building on an industrial estate packed with warehouses and a weird nightclub where machete-wielding men are commonplace. Many a Monday morning I've had to jump over "do not cross" tape to get inside while the police aren't looking. Wandering around in the wee hours is scary. It's not fear of the dark per se, more fear of who or what might hiding in it. I'm a bit of wuss really and tend to run through the deserted offices in case someone jumps out of a cupboard and tries to kill me with a circuit board.

It turns out that working nights is just like working day shifts, only a bit more crap than normal, and with more coffee/energy drinks and things that go bump in the night (or bump-bamma-bump-de-bump. I can hear the basslines from the nightclub in the toilets while I'm doing my best impression of a hippo in a tutu). Let's just hope Pratchett got it right about the other stuff. It would be terrible to visit Ankh-Morpork and find it's a tiny village with no werewolves, dwarves, vampires, zombies or dragons at all.