"Who wants the early shift?" the boss woman asked.
"I do," I said. "I'm up early anyway." I had no idea what the early shift meant. I wasn't sleeping well but concluded that the Trazodone didn't make a difference because I just don't sleep much with or without it. I'm up at 5:30 or 6 am as often as not so what the hell?
"His shift starts at 4:00," she said. "His name is Mike." Could I have picked a worse shift for my sleep problems? Some of the problems earlier in the week were of my own doing, having fallen asleep before 7 pm on Wednesday, for example. I even had a hard time doing the math. This was a virtual swap of my sleep cycle. I'd have to try to get six hours of sleep. I'd have to wake up at 2:15 am. Falling asleep at 8:15 pm? Not bloody likely.
Ever have that feeling when you only get a little sleep? You know, "edginess and what feels like low blood pressure, and all of the sudden I would feel faint?" In other words, how much of these symptoms of four hours of sleep that first night were due to the Trazodone withdrawals? Come on, quit blaming the drugs, Stephen. How about as bad a schedule as anybody could have?
I fell asleep before 7 pm again. I didn't know that of course, and I play this guessing game. I fall asleep each night on the living room couch. When my Roku goes into stand-by mode, it displays a clock. "What time is it now?" I ask myself before I get the answer. "Oh gawd, let it be 1:30," I prayed. No such luck. I was screwed.
I was in another quandary; fall back asleep on the couch and miss the alarm in my room, or try to fall asleep in my room? My shrink asked if I had ever been enrolled in one of those sleep studies. "No, I have a bad mattress and both my hips and my back hurt so when I wake up to go to the toilet, it's too painful to get back to sleep."
I have another quandary that was worrying me more than a little at this late hour of 9:00 pm. "Will I hear my alarm?" I have a Radio Shack alarm that I've had since 1973. Problem is, I can't hear it if I have a sound-muffling pillow covering my right ear. The compounded bad news there is that my left hip hurts too much to sleep on, so my right ear is not exposed if I'm ever able to sleep in the fetal position. In fact, I usually get back to sleep by getting my iPhone and tuning in to Ira Glass on "This American Life." I don't like Ira much. Most news people are close-mouthed about their religion, Ira is a militant atheist Jew. I place the iPhone under the pillow and it magnifies the sound. It works nine times out of ten. That first night, or was it early morning, I listened to the whole episode. My luck, it was a great one called "
Little War on the Prairie." What are the chances it's about the largest mass execution in American history and it took place in a little town an hour from here?
I only had to do this miserable shift twice, and the first alarm didn't even have to go off. I don't remember how much I slept, though it wasn't much. That's a new tact for me, i.e. not to fret about my sleep, as I'm lacking it, thinking back on it, or preparing for the next go-around. I was up before 2 am and had two strong cups of coffee, working on another to bring into work with me.
I drive from the southwest side of Minneapolis to the northeast side, right through the downtown interchange. It's quiet that time of night. However, Hennepin Avenue is an interesting demographic. It's a cacophony of taxis and black Lincoln Town Cars. If one ever wondered what the disproportionate number of Somali immigrants do for a living, the answer is found at 2:45 am on Hennepin Avenue. I felt sorry for the women who were walking home. Not because I'm a racist and it was just them and the Somalis, it's because a woman doesn't belong on the streets at 3 am in any town, U.S.A., let alone Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis.
There's not a lot of things I'm sure of in my life, but I am sure the limos are not there to shuffle people to their jobs for the early shift. It was sort of cool seeing how the other half lived.
So, I get to work at 3:40, (five minutes early), and there are a few buses getting the pre-inspection. It's a whole checklist. I ask a guy if he's Mike, and then another.
"Yes," Mike says.
"I'm the one who's training with you," I tell him, trying to hide the combination of exhaustion, lack of sleep, and early caffeine buzz at the same time.
"I didn't know I had a trainee," he said. "Good thing you're here, I was just pulling out."
"Oh good," I thought. "And what if I'd have been five minutes later? I don't know a lot of things for sure, but if I had to go home I would not have slept the rest of the night. I would have just had "Dispatch" call him back to base.
Let me just say this about Mike; he's a 62 year old who doesn't believe we should raise minimum wage, or that there is such a thing as global warming.
The first day was fine. Mike had this thing he said that started to wear on me pretty fast though. "We gotta boogie." he said I was too fast around the turns and too slow to accelerate. I guess along with no concerns about global warming he wasn't concerned about the effect of taking a three ton bus and putting the hammer down to accelerate vs. saving gas?
There was no classroom time for training on the Mentor Engineering Ranger system, and that sucked at 4:00 am. I had to drive streets I didn't know and mess with the system at the same time. The concept is cool but implementing it on no sleep? I live to tell about it. Or, I guess I could sarcastically say I guess I understand why they don't let us talk on our cell phones, it would be one too many things to worry about.
I'm looking at the paper manifest, and then the Ranger screen and then I hear, "Let's boogie."
I'm not saying he wasn't a good trainer, I'm saying I don't boogie before sunrise. On the bright side of things, sunrise was about 5 am and there was something sort of cool about seeing that come up on a sleepy town until rush hour hit. At that point I was four hours into a stressful workday with a huge bus and new equipment, being led around by a republican. What's wrong with this picture?
I'm heavy on the graphics and light on the brain dump for a reason; how many ways can one describe exhaustion? There's a saying that's even on the lapel of our florescent green vests, "If you can't do it safely, don't do it." I shouldn't have been driving as long as I did without a break Saturday morning.
I was barely able to keep the bus on the road for a bit. I was totally discombobulated trying to figure out where I was without the GPS. I know, I hate learning curves, but we were heading to the VA hospital for the third time and I thought it was a route I'd taken before, looking for landmarks that would help me. My internal compass was spinning like Admiral Byrd's on the North Pole, so that wasn't any good. I told Mike about 8:00 I needed a break but we had to boogie to get our vet in purple velvet jogging suit to his destination. Who knows, maybe Mike was a homophobe as well. What are the chances?
I guess the low point was merging onto 55 mph traffic at 20 mph and having Mike holler, "you're merging onto 55 mile per hour traffic at 20 miles per hour, we have to boogie."
I apologized more than once, and confessed I wasn't alert enough for that last venture. I sort of mentioned that I had asked for our 8:00 lunch break, or at least hinted at him driving but he didn't hear me or something.
As the say wore on I was starting to suspect he was picking on me. There's a gyro-scope thing on the steering column. It has three or four green lights and the same in orange lights. I think there are four orange ones, the fifth could be the dreaded red one. If a driver sets the red one off the camera records the previous 15 seconds and the next 15 seconds. It's sort of like the airline black box, i.e. it's always recording, just not storing it.
Here's what sets the camera off:
- Stopping too quickly
- Hitting a curve
- Cornering too sharply
- Mike yelling at me
I was driving along the scenic route from Minneapolis to St. Paul along with Mississippi River. I thought the lights were all magnetically triggered. Whatever the reason, it turned orange. "No, no no!" Mike screamed. as he saying "go" or "no?"
"How many lights?" he's hollering? "Did you set off the camera?"
"I didn't watch how many lights," I told him honestly. "I was watching the road." I wanted to say, "I was watching the fucking road and trying to decipher if you were backseat driving and saying go or stop. "What would have happened if I had not tried to stop?" I asked.
"You would have run the red light," he said.
"Then what happens?" I asked.
"We would have gone back to base," he said. Then he used a term that sounded dead serious, like really bad, to describe what mandatory back-to-base means, and it didn't sound nice.
Okay, so it was the second time he was concerned about me setting off the cameras. The first time was defensive driving. I was on a narrow street and wasn't sure if the driver on my left was going to be giving me my lane or not so I hit the brakes.
And then there were the more than a few times where Mike, from his vantage point, was hollering, "You're going to hit the curb, you're going to hit the curb!" In my defense, I only hit the curb one of those half dozen times he was sure I would do so.
"You were so close I could have put a piece of paper between the curb and the tire and it wouldn't have cut it," he said once. What does that even mean?
The nice thing about his schedule is that he normally gets off at about noon. He was on that schedule of 4 am until 12:30 pm five days a week. He'd been on it for a year and a half. By the end of the second day, I think I had him re-evaluate his relationship with his wife of 34 years and such a schedule, and he said he might not keep that schedule forever. Oh, another thing about Mike; he has a cabin in the woods. Don't get me wrong, that sounds nice... in Colorado. A cabin in the woods in Minnesota in the summer? He hadn't been there lately, know why? It's been too wet. Know what that means? Too many mosquitoes. Did you know we know how to spell M O S Q U I T O E S in Minnesota?
Well, he had five days of eight hour shifts. I wanted to get going on the increased pay ASAP so we worked ten hour shifts. And that meant leaving home at 3 am and getting home about 3:30 pm. Near the end of the second day there was a traffic jam. Instead of the now familiar I-94 road Mike was running me through all sorts of side streets with all sorts of railroad crossings. I was hurting. I was tired. It wasn't safe.
We made the last drop and I asked him to drive back to base, I didn't want to push my luck.
How tired was I? I actually wanted to take a picture of the lift operation. I consciously had to make sure I didn't hit the wrong button while somebody was on the lift. What would happen if I hit "Fold" when I should have hit "Down", or vice verse? Or "Fold" while they were wheeling themselves onto the bus? Or any number of stupid things a person with little sleep, and being told to boogie by a republican would do. Each time I delivered a client/customer/patient/victim safely I phantom high-five'd myself. When I'm this tired, the little victories help. Of course, Mike said I had to boogie a bit more in the loading and unloading process but I'd get the hang of it.
"Good job," he said when we got back to the training room and sat there as he filled out the forms in triplicate with blue pen.
"You're the best cadet I ever trained." I didn't say it but who decided to give us a title for two to three days of training? And why not pre-cadet, or
plebe when we were doing the BTW training?
I got my schedule:
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 1:30 pm until 9:30 pm.
Thursday and Friday off
Saturday and Sunday from 11 am until 7:30 pm.
That's like banker's hours. I'll admit it, I'm a TV addict. If I am home in the evening I watch TV. I don't watch TV in the daytime, but I suspect Mike does. So I have a great schedule and only one hurdle to overcome.
Now all I had to do was get my schedule and await my criminal record report to be cleared going back seven years. That put me in Minneapolis, Omaha, and Portland. My wife at the time had moved to Concord, New Hampshire but I just moved the furniture out there, stayed two nights, and was kicked to the curb. Guess where I'm being held up for my criminal background check? Yep, Concord, New Hampshire.
Don't blame her, I lost my meds and went psychotic. I'd have kicked me to the curb too if I were her for what I did. It was psychotic.
? They said the gates open at 8:30. I guess I should have wondered what gates those were. Not I be cynical but I think I'll be lucky to be able to see him at all.
