Working 3rd shift can be very difficult on your body. For your body to tolerate working nights it can take months or years, but you never truly seem to adapt to it. I found this out only a couple weeks into a new helpdesk job. I worked alone in a quite office area that only had the low hum of the air conditioner units. It was challenging to stay awake.

One night, I felt very tired and was doing everything to try to stay awake. As I was typing up an email, I would find myself nodding off for a split second just to wake up to a bunch of random characters across the screen. This must have happened two or three times in a row. I didn’t get more than a sentence written in 20-30 minutes. That’s the last I remember until I woke up to a person on the speaker phone saying, “so what do you think the problem is”? I don’t remember answering the phone, saying hello or have an understanding what the person just told me. I was like a deer in the headlights; frozen and in a daze. The best I could say was “what”? After a short moment of silence on the phone, I finally managed to try to coverup the fact I didn’t have a clue who I was talking to or what they called about. I stated, “sorry I was having problems hearing you with this headset. Please tell me again what’s going on”. Lucky for me the person on the line believed it and repeated everything. I would have to omit that was the first time I answered a phone while asleep.