It’s Saturday morning, and I’m up at 6 AM again for my fourth training shift in eight days. I’m tired. I’ve not only being dealing with getting up very early, but also with staying up late: on Wednesday, I was the “live from the control room” connection for a San Francisco Bay Area party to celebrate the start of the LHC. The party was in the evening there, which meant the middle of the night here, and so for me, Circulation Day stretched from 9 AM until 6 AM the following morning, when I finally left work. That made for a very abbreviated Thursday, because I had a shift yesterday (Friday) at 7 AM as well.
Anyway, I’ve actually had it easy with the shifts so far, because training shifts are all day shifts. I’m (probably) almost done with them though, and ready to start running the station on my own. (There are experts on call if something happens that I’ve never seen, thankfully!) I’ve just been asked to submit my shift availability for October, and here it is:
Green means I’m willing to take a shift at that time, red means I can’t; the horizontal axis is the 31 days of the month, while the three vertical entries are the 7-3 day shift, the 3-11 evening shift, and the 11-7 night shift. There are two things you should note:
- You can probably guess which weekend I’m meeting a friend in Zagreb, Croatia.
- I’m willing to take as many night shifts as day shifts — which means that I can be put on as many night shifts as the shift scheduler thinks is reasonable. Three or four nights in a row is not unusual as all.
Fortunately, as a new shifter I’ll still be on the day shift for a bit, so I at least won’t be waking the experts up when I screw up and have to call them. But there’s work to be done, and I have to be willing to work (almost) all the time. And you know what? I’m thrilled to be doing it.
Tags: control room, shift, student life
