Working under the Stars

I’ve had a pretty easy time adapting to the sleep schedule. No matter what time I get home in the morning, I don’t go to sleep until 1030-1100 and I have my windows covered with blackout shades. I’m wide awake all night long for my run when I start at 2015 usually waking up for work at 1830-1900.

I’m also happier on linehaul than doing city P&d because I’m usually getting home at 0630-0700, so I have breakfast with my family, get the kids off to school and help my wife take care of stuff around the house to get her ahead of her day. I’m also home to have dinner with them before work and goof around with them. I see more of my family on linehaul LTL than I did on p&D. One thing is for certain, it wouldn’t work if I didn’t have an awesome and supportive wife. She stays home with the kids so that’s another dynamic of how it works for us.

I love love love nighttime linehaul.

 

There is no such thing as graveyard.

The stars have a name. Generally big dipper, little dipper and thus you can find the North Star.

The positions of the dippers around the actual north star in the sky tells you when it's 10'o clock. Then 10:15 then 30 then 45 then 11 PM. Most nights you can look up any time to the relative positions of the dippers around the north star and estimate your actual time to within 15 minutes. Try it. It will take you a while to learn.

Once you know north, you will not get lost again. IF you learned enough of particular stars you have enough when combined with spherical mathematics to determine roughly where you are on the planet if you had very specific tools and a accurate clock to do it with. Essentially you are the GPS.

I spent many a night trying to recall the names of the stars. One night I was in west central texas during a regional power failure. I had to stop and get out.

I looked straight up and being so far from any light source (My truck was shut off totally all the way down for that exercise plus a 20 minute wait to switch eyes over to night vision sort of...) There were millions of stars, satellites, Planets. The absolute darkness of that valley combined with perfect april conditions and 50 degrees that night absolute clear gave me a vision of what heaven might look like if I was somehow to get away from this dirty old planet with it's choking bad air between me and the stars.

Dispatch did not understand why I sit 40 minutes there in that spot of all places it was such a unusual event and I had to explain the situation a number of times before it was accepted as no threat to the stupid cargo in that gd truck. Sheesh, live a little why don't you. Such joyless company drones seeking to fire drivers who like looking outside once in a while.

We call those 30 minute mandatory breaks today per HOS don't you agree?

It's almsot 2 am where i am, my day has just pretty much getting going. Eveyrone else is falling down sleeping. Tired to give a #### about anything. But Im rolling. Have been these last 6 hours. Another 10 or so to go. (Not in a truck, but with a variety of chores and so on in the night to keep occupied)

 

3rd shift has it's pluses and minuses, like anything in life. It's great not dealing with traffic, but home life will definitely suffer. For most of my career, I was up at midnight, and started at 1am for years. Sometimes, I wouldn't get home until 2 or 3pm, try and be a family man, off to bed by 6pm to do it again. Evening activities, some that just shouldn't be missed by a father, took it's toll. Get home at 9pm, try and sleep for 2 or 3 hours, and off you go. It's the life of a regional trucker. OTR drivers got more sleep than I did.

 

That's a rough schedule. I had a 2am start for a while at my last job and the only way I could do it and take care of my dad responsibilities in the evening was to sleep around 3 hours after work and again later for around 3 hours before work. That was truly brutal.

To answer the original question, my experience basically lines up with @classicst . I don't always get home in time for breakfast, but I am always up around 5pm to do dad duties (fetch a kid or two), help fix and eat dinner, and participate in the evening bathtime/bedtime toddler wind down routine.

My wife and I both like it more than the late morning start I had as a low-seniority P&D driver, because I was never home for dinner or any of the rest of that nice evening family chill time. She was usually exhausted and winding down and I had a ways to go, so we weren't really spending much quality time together after I got off work. Plus, I was always microwaving my dinner. I hated doing that every night.

Blackout curtains, etc. are a must. It helps to be a night owl in the first place because the bottom line is that driving all night in the dark isn't natural. Even if you're fully rested, melatonin production happens in the dark and severe sleepiness can come on suddenly. Conversely, trying to sleep during the day with sunlight streaming in will halt melatonin production, so it's important to be able to "trick" your system by eliminating all light from your sleep space.

There are all kinds of techniques that help maintain alertness at night, and the phone can be a life saver. A lot of it is about preventing that initial trance state from setting in. Maybe I'll elaborate on the many techniques when I have some time, but for now, I gotta...
....Zzzzzz.....Zzzzzzz

 

i set my cruise, and bungee cord the steering wheel, and have at a nap......no problem for me.


seriously, it's like any other "graveyard shift" job..

how do nurses do it, police, firemen, any night time worker...???

you get to see your family when you get home in the AM, and they are off to school, or the spouse off to work.

you get to see them at dinner time, and on weekends..

no problems......

 

One of my personal favorites is a 4 day early warning from the bossman to switch from day work shift to night work. So there I am 4 days off at home doing one thing. Staying up at night, sleeping by day. By the third day I have managed to flip my clock and presto rolling.

One day a bigger boss canceled my shift to that particular customer leaving me to face the next day at work with none of the 4 day flipping of the body back. I was not able to keep up until I took a weeks paid vacation for the year. It's ridiculous. Having to adjust the entire life to a whim of a manager deep in his ivory tower.

Someday I am manager.

But anyway... the biggest thing we rely on in trucking for sleep is a perfect blackout in terms of window curtians up front, skylight cover and so on. That truck cab and sleeper becomes one big space without a speck of daytime sun getting in. Only then I can sleep for sure. It has to be black.

I make do at home with heavy lined thermal curtians and black curtians together. Eventually I have something over my windows. And you wonder why there is foil on some of he houses in my area. Ive been doing some brainstorming ltely and seeing about actual blackout covers big enough that seals all light in my windows will be a victory.

On bad days when the medicines rule my mind and body (Too much...) I have to sleep. No two ways about it. I could go after it with a pot of coffee, but it's best just to sleep it off and get moving out of bed. As in get outside into the sun.

 

I would think it would be easier in many ways if anyone was electing to drive overnight for OTR. Trucks stops and spaces to park wide open when you shut down, probably more places ok with you parking there as well. And driving, far less traffic. If you're someone who can shut down at say 7am, relax a few hours and then crash hard behind those blinds during the day, you've got it made. If you struggle with daytime sleeping? You're in for a rough ride.

 

Kind of off topic a bit but if there’s any advice I can give from my time with Linehaul it’s try to keep(ish) your schedule over the weekend. I know guys that’d get home Saturday morning kick the boots off and treat the day like a “normal” day. By noon your eyes are bleeding and by 4 pm you’re nodding off like a heroin addict. I’ll be the first to admit I’ll cheat a bit and get by on a series of naps and set myself up Sunday night for Monday morning all I have to do is wave with one hand to my daughter getting on the bus with my sleep mask in the other. And yes, as stated, black out curtains are your friend.