First Shift

Finished my first shift with Hatts Off. It's an overnight position, so it started Sunday night and ended Monday morning. Last time I did an overnight was at Dare, the cookie factory where they had me counting wafer cookie sheets on my first shift, which is worse than counting sheep for making you drowsy, and then they had me acting as an Oven Room worker, but I spent all my time in Packaging, because at Dare, for whatever reason, they only have male Oven Room workers and only female Packagers, but there was a heavy lifting position in Packaging.

That was the gap summer between year 1 and year 2 of Social Work, and Liberty Staffing was giving me regular short-term assignments at Well.ca, Bird Packaging, Dare, and some plastic company, which were all on the same street. Liberty owns that street.

 I also did overnights before college, as an assembly worker for LPP, as a machine operator at Linnex, and I did rotating shifts at the Linimar Centre. Never done it for a social work field, though. I don't hate nights, but rotating is brutal, since you can't get your internal clock used to anything.

Before my first shift, I worker with two Extend-a-Family contracts, which means that I managed to work seventeen and a half hours in under twenty four hours, not including travel time.

Whooooo! Those are HOURS baby! For someone who hasn't been getting enough of them, that's satisfying.

My first shift was night of the full moon. This sketched me out because at both UMAB and Safe Management training, they really played up the ominous nature of the full moon, saying it's the worst day of every month.

Was fine though. I may finally have developed a sustainable way of living. Only took me until I was twenty-freakin'-seven. The question now is what do I do if I get accepted into university. I'm an ambitious person, but after dealing with so many unwanted challenges for as long as I have, there's a real temptation to just set up camp, make money, pay off my credit card, put money back into my savings, take driving lessons, and know that, if I keep doing tomorrow what I did today, I will survive.

It was a weird day in general, though. Daylight Savings time, my brother's birthday, full moon and start of my first shift.

My brother's 25 by the way. Quarter century, it's kind of a weird one. 26 and 27 have been more comfortable because they aren't round numbers like that. He seemed to take it alright.