American Slacker

I’ve worked a few third-shift jobs, and on the night shift it’s easy to lose sense of the real world. An occasional second-shift can restore the medium-slacker vibe, but a long third-shift run can put you in a big chill. At the hospital, I ran medical records back and forth to the ER, up and down the hallways and tunnels of that old building, learning many shortcuts from hip, late night, co-workers over caffeine-dream chats roving the buzzing, fluorescent nocturnal world. During the downtime, they made us file.. but we never filed enough to make them happy, so we’d get a strict speech, from a disappointed secretary, over piles of files, but they overloaded on purpose, so.. It was a midnight to 8 shift, but for me a 12:08am to 8:10am shift, rolling in a few minutes late, then killing a few minutes in the AM, bantering with real-world folks, watching secretaries sashay by, smiles, tilted coffee mugs through leather bags, or big sunglasses and stern looks after weekend romantic getaways with suave doctors and pharmaceutical sales kings. Apparently, no one told me about the extremely strict hospital “on time” rule, so at my yearly evaluation, at 8:30am sharp on a Tuesday, my day-boss looked downhearted, saying we had a problem. She held a long printout documenting my latenesses, no surprise to me, but announced the extreme actions: 1 tardiness = warning, 2 tardinesses = a notice, and 3 = discipline and/or firing. She seemed really shocked about my custom schedule, especially the number of, which was either impressive, or horrifying, coming in at 157! She rambled a bit then, thinking aloud, about how the normal procedure of her “finding this out” was getting ratted out by co-workers, so, on the plus side, I must be liked. Further good news for me was that it would look even worse for her, so we would lie, using some bureaucratic ruse, to protect her position and good manager rating. We’d claim we postponed this meeting for three months, due to a “personal matter” she’d make up later. I’d come in on-time from now on, and get a good review then. I agreed, and she smiled, hopeful we could pull off this scheme. She was a nice person, so I felt a little bad about having harshed her mellow in that high stress world, but as I was walking to car I thought, 157 censures, man, I worked a lot of days, or nights, last year!