24-hour web goddess

I have a confession, I started a new job right after we returned from London but I haven’t been ready to blog about it. Blogging about work is a tricky business, especially when your work is the web. But there’s so much I’d like to share…

The job is here in Atlanta, close to home, working on a huge web site, with a large team of web, content, design, you name it, specialist people, all in the private sector. These factors have made for a vastly different job experience than I’ve been in for the past eight years. Those years were in an intimate, small scale environment, with equally small budgets. The biggest difference, however, is the schedule. I now am part of a team that is staffed around the clock.

Between being the new person on the team and it being the holidays, I have been assigned third shift for at least the next month. This means I work from 11pm to 7am, five nights a week, Sunday through Thursday.

I just completed my first week of overnights. The first night felt like torture, like extreme jet lag. I spend my nights working closely with the Hong Kong branch of the company. However, if I’d really gone to Hong Kong, I’d be seeing more daylight.

Now I’m on my weekend, but because my sleep schedule is reversed, it doesn’t feel like much of a weekend. Last night I stayed up until 5am, trying to be quiet while SB slept and puttering around my room. Today I slept for a large part of the daylight and now I’m not sure what I’m going to do with myself. I am not a morning person, so this schedule reversion is probably easier for me than for others. Darkness does not trigger sleep in my body and as I learn how to adjust my eating schedule, this should get even easier.

This past week I have been riding the train home every morning. It is filled with sleepy eyed commuters, lunch bags in hand and surely teenagers, wishing for their beds. As we glide above the city streets, I finally feel a sense of urban life about this otherwise suburban city. The sunrise peaks, just as I reach my stop and the intense pinks and purples of the early light, even make the cold trainstop look beautiful.

I have many concerns about this job, about this life, about this city but I wanted a change, I wanted something new and here I am, living an adventure.