Working the night shift: Brain-dead and dangerous.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health lists sleep problems, digestive issues, and heart disease as major issues for long term wokers of irregular shifts, most specifically night shift.  I have worked the vast majority of my adult life on such graveyard shifts, and I can attest to some of the negative physical affects that, over time, you can definitely notice from essentially asking your body to perform in the exact opposite timeframe that it is designed for.  However, to that official list of NIOSH safety issues for night workers, I can attest to one more:  random acts of complete retardidity (a Spaky Brown word, I'm pretty sure).  Sometimes, somewhere in the middle of the night on a random work night, you will for no good reason lose all manner of reasoning capacity and if you are unlucky, motor skills will soon follow in the general mutiny against yourself.  This is the state I found myself in last night, and it sparked a conversation with my supervisor about another such night, both of which I'll describe below.

It began last night routinely enough.  I went down into the basement at work to put something away, and found my supervisor, Bob, down there trying to move a pallet of salt bags via a manual pallet jack.  He wasn't having much luck, so being the nice guy that I am, I offered to show him how to properly use the device, whereupon I proceeded to mount the pallet on the jack and prepare to move the 2,500ish pounds of salt down the ramp and next to the water softener where it belonged.  To anyone who knows what a pallet jack is and how they are used, you would know that if you intend on using one to move a heavy load down an incline, you NEVER put yourself on down side of the load. 

It's pure physics, really.  I think it's the 27th Law of Thermonuclearquantumdynamics (I'll have to check with my sister's step-dad on this, he would know) that states "an object that is in motion will tend to stay in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force".  In other words, 2,500 pound of salt will roll right over your ass if you get in the way like I did.  As soon as I pulled the jack over the incline of the ramp, it started lumbering out of control at me.  It looked something like this:

  Realizing quickly that I just pulled the dumbest, knuckle-dragging Neanderthal inspired move, I tried to jump out of the way, but it's a narrow ramp and lined on either side by quarts parts that run into the multiple thousands of dollars each.  So while my boss looked on in abject horror, I jerked the pallet jack toward one side, where it demolished a box of aforementioned quarts parts.  I'm thinking, surely, that I'm screwed now.  But no, my supervisor just starts laughing hysterically once it's clear that I'm unharmed and out of danger.  And he says "Ray, that's the dadgumbedest thing I ever did see".  Bob, my supervisor is from the backwoods of Arkansas.  Anyway, he continues, "I haven't seen anyone do anything that dumb since I heard of someone a few years ago nearly light them self up with a bottle of alcohol and one of the dryers upstairs".  To which my feeble response was "Yea, I know about that too, because it was me who did it".  I think the only reason I didn't get in any trouble for being a complete moron tonight was on account of Bob's damn near passing out from laughing at me. 


   So a few years ago, I was all caught up on my work and looking for things to pass the time. I decided I'd clean my area and the machines I run and make sure everything was nice and spiffy.  I moped, I scrubbed, I shined, and generally did stuff that would make that bald guy that pops off cleaning supply bottles in the commercials very proud.  Then I noticed my dryer's intake grate was a bit dusty.  The dryers look something like this:

  So, while it was plugged in and running, I had the bright idea that I'd take one of the water bottles lying around and squeeze some onto the air intake grating and then towel it off to clean it.  There are two problems with this idea.  One, you shouldn't EVER use water on an electrical appliance that is plugged in and running (I had some silicon wafers in front of it still, drying).  Two, you should REALLY never use pure alcohol on an electrical appliance that is plugged in and running and happens to have a heating coil that is red hot and can easily spark a fire from said alcohol fumes.  Can you see where this is going?  Mistakenly thinking it was a bottle of water, I squirted a long stream of pure isopropyl alcohol into the intake of this heater, whereupon it IMMEDIATELY turns into a huge, flame-throwing catastrophe.  In case you've never seen a complete fool light alcohol off in such a manner, it burns BRIGHT blue. 

My buddy Brent happened to be standing a few feet behind me while I did all this, and he tells me later that as soon as the fire started to shoot out the dryer, I jumped probably 3 feet straight in the air and proceeded to jump up and down in similar fashion for the better part of 20 seconds, all the while screaming like his little daughter.  As shocked and disoriented as I was from the accidental flamethrower, I still realized that my wafers were now straight in the path of the flames, so I stuck my whole arm in to pull them out.  Now, two more things.  Burnt hair stinks badly.  I have lots of arm hair.  By the time I stopped jumping up and down like a man possessed, the alcohol had all burned out and all that was left was some charred silicon and the wretched stench of an arm full of curled up black lumps that used to be hair.  Like Bob, my buddy Brent is a bit of a backwards country boy, and he too says to me at the time, "Ray, that was the dadgumbdest thing I ever did see". 

The moral of this story?  Don't play with fire?  Respect the 27th Law of Thermonuclearquantumdynamics?  I think it's much more basic than that.  I think the moral is, go to college.  Get a degree in something that doesn’t even HAVE a night shift.  Spare yourself the life-threatening possibilities of being awake and at work at 3a.m. on some random Tuesday night and getting physically mutilated by fire or squashed by a load of salt.  In the mean time, I have to work tonight again, so it's sleep time here. I'm gonna throw a little salt over my shoulder for good luck (just a pinch, not 2500 pounds) and head off to see the sandman.