Deployments

I occasionally have to go into work on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, for an all-nighter deployment. And it’s always the same. As much as I’d like to change the pattern, my body won’t cooperate.

The first part is the good part: I sleep in. Maybe not as much as I’d like—I’d really prefer to sleep in until around noon or so—but still, 9:30 is better than 7:00.

In the afternoon I lie down, either on the couch or in my bed, hoping for a nap that never comes. I get close to falling asleep, but never actually nod off. (This is the part where my body is refusing to comply with my wishes.) I finally give up, and go and have supper, or watch TV, or something.

On the way into the office, I stop in at a convenience store for some snacks. And I mean a lot of snacks; chocolate bars, chips, drinks—whatever catches my eye, as I wander through the store. Sometimes I eat it all, over the course of the deployment, and sometimes I don’t even eat half of it. (Once I bought a box of Crackerjacks, and ate the whole thing. After a couple of hours, I was sick of it, but then I kept finding my hand wandering back into the box for another mouthful…)

Finally, about five or ten minutes before the actual work of the deployment is scheduled to begin, is the time that I start to get tired. Lousy timing, I know. (Another instance of my body refusing to obey my mind.) But I manage to keep my wits about me, and hopefully I don’t get too grumpy.

By the time it finishes, sometimes I’m in fine shape to drive home, and other times I’m a bit more tired than I’d like to be. Once I was way too tired to drive, and yet I did anyway, but I haven’t done that again. (I only lived about ten minutes from my apartment, at the time, so I decided to chance it. But I shouldn’t have. The problem, of course, with being too tired to drive, is that you’re also too tired to think clearly about it.) Unfortunately, these days I’m between a rock and a hard place, when I finish my deployments; Andrea needs the car to get to church, so if I ever get too tired to drive home, I don’t know what I’ll do.

I normally slide into bed right around the time that Andrea is getting up. And sleep badly, and not nearly as long as I’d like. Which means that I wake up, a few hours later, groggy, grumpy, and very much out of it. Which means my Sunday is ruined. Except that I get to complain; everyone likes to complain.