Tuesday sleep deprivation haiku
The weekend on-call,
risk of sleep deprivation.
Kills desire to write.
Part of my day job involves being on-call for one weekend in every 6-8 weeks to fill in the gaps between our 24-hour “follow the sun” customer model when the North American team finishes their Friday afternoon and the Asia-Pacific team starts their Monday morning. It’s easily the worst part of my job which, as far as things go in workplaces, means it’s a pretty good job.
My first week on-call saw my first call-out occur at 1:00am Saturday morning and took 3 hours to fix. The next call came in at 5:00am and took 4 hours, during which another call came in at 7:00am so had to work two emergencies concurrently. By 11:00pm Saturday evening I was beginning to panic as it was clear the calls were going to continue, many being worked in parallel, I’d had no sleep since Thursday night, and I was working at 100% workload. It continued until 6:00am Monday (before we had the Asia-Pacific team)… and I had to be in the office for 9:00am. Your mind starts to do weird things in that kind of situation, and I can honestly say that I have some idea of what sleep deprivation torture is all about. (Though such victims tend not to get paid for the experience and it’s not done by their employers).
That experience was almost five years ago and I’m pleased to say that this weekend on-call was nothing like that first one (in fact, nobody in the company has ever seen a weekend like that). But living with that possibility stifles all creativity, so this weekend was spent watching DVDs and, perversely, waiting for Monday. On the plus side, I’ve now finally seen George Romero’s Dead trilogy — which was purely for research on the zombie story I’m writing, you understand…
Now it’s Tuesday and the juices are flowing again!
