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Part 1
| RealAudio 2.0 14.4, RealAudio 3.0 28.8 |
On the night shift you follow two clocks.
(slow drum music rolls under)One is that clock up on the factory wall or in the dashboard of your delivery truck. That's the clock telling you to stay on the job, to stay awake and alert until your shift ends at sunrise. Then there's another clock, about the size of a pinhead, down at the base of your brain. It's the one commanding the rest of your body to go to sleep NOW! That internal clock is an amazingly brawny little timepiece.
(Woman): When you work all night long, and you don't get to bed until 7 or 8 in the morning and the sun's just coming up, I found it for myself very difficult, even though I'm very much a night person. I'm a night person up to about 3 am.What price? The people who study shift work and fatigue like to point out that some of the most notorious industrial catastrophes in recent history- the Three Mile Island nuclear power accident and the one at Chernobyl or the chemical plant disaster at Bhopal, India - all were caused by sleepy workers struggling against their biological clocks. Harvard University sleep researcher Charles Czeisler:(Man): Right around 5 o'clock in the morning you really hit that bone zone. It's the natural time when you hit that real deep sleep. So, it's a fight.
(Man): We're very much a species that's designed to work well during the daytime and be asleep at night, pure and simple. We have very bad night vision, we don't do very well at night. All of our physiological systems are shutting down. Our brains are really at their lowest performance ebb.
(Man): Between 3 and 5 in the morning are the highest numbers of errors, incidents, accidents; just in the number of fatal, single-car accidents that occur. There's no question that your biological clock is driving that. It's indisputable now. Sleep is not up there as a national health concern, but it should be. So we understand really what price we're paying for dealing with this.
The National Commission on Sleep Disorders estimated that the cost to society in terms of productivity and errors and accidents is about 70 billion dollars a year. The human cost, of course, is when you see people being killed in automobile accidents because drivers are nodding off and falling asleep at the wheel having been awake all night.Some five to ten million Americans work nights. In the history of work it's a relatively new shift. Until the invention of electric lights a century ago, most people rose and set with the sun. But in many modern jobs the assumption is that to work nights all you needed to do is get tough and learn to live on less sleep. Most night workers report that their bodies never really adapt to this schedule. Only in recent years have employers and scientists looked closely at how working all night can affect people.
Music fades into following scene.It's Monday evening in a suburban Minneapolis household.SOUND: (boy) Color it a different color. Color it red.
SOUND: (boy) Color his eyes blue.The three Banham kids are coloring pictures and teasing each other while mom and dad get the evening chores done. Melissa Banham is a police sergeant who works the day shift investigating sex crimes. She used to work nights.
Melissa: It was very hard to adjust to. I never felt good, I never felt healthy, I never felt well-rested. Kinda in the zombie zone majority of the time.Melissa's husband Don recently went back to the night shift. It came with his promotion to lieutenant. He works 8 PM to 6 AM, a shift that cops call the dog watch. Don seems reasonably well-adapted to this schedule. When he gets home each morning he helps the kids get dressed, then he steals up to the bedroom.
Don: And so I try to make the room as dark as I possibly can. I shut off all the phones and I basically lock myself in the room and hibernate. I get my best sleep during the week when she's at work and the kids are at day care.Two-year-old Rachel has the chicken pox . She was too sick for day care. So when Don got home this morning after a 10-hour shift, he had a testy toddler to handle.Don: (off mike) What's the matter Rachel? (unhappy child …)
Don: We went in the bedroom and turned on the TV. We have a VCR and TV in the bedroom there. I went downstairs and got some of her favorite movies and brought them up. I tried to nap in between that. So I've gotten a couple hours throughout the day.Don Banham spends most of the night in his cruiser. As shift commander, he's the top cop for the whole city of Minneapolis. Don's the one they call if something big happens.Smith: And you're on the fourth of a five day stretch so you're feeling pretty crispy today.
Don: Oh, absolutely. (laughs)
SOUND: traffic, radio: Squad 24 able
Music rolls: "Strange Meeting", Bill Frisell
Radio: 241 able..
Radio: On the theft of a boombox. Caller is downstairs. Suspect is a teenager that lives upstairs. Not sure if he's home…
Radio: 241 copy…
SOUND: cell phone beeping, rings. Hi this is Banham, car 9. What's on fire there south?
Radio: A bicycle theft just occurred.And if nothing happens, Don basically drives around, one end of town to the other listening to the radio. Waiting. According to surveys, few night workers actually choose the graveyard shift. Those who do, like Don Banham, often enjoy the freedom and increased responsibility that comes from having fewer bosses around. When the night is full of action, time passes quickly and Don doesn't have to struggle so hard to stay awake. But he never knows what the shift will bring.
Don: Well, it's four o'clock and it's still staying pretty quiet. (Smith: so is this the dog hour of the dog watch, four in the morning?) Yeah, especially if it's quiet. You learn to cherish these moments if you…..A squad reports that a suspicious car it stopped suddenly took off. The chase is on.Radio: 461 vehicle taking off. Going west bound on 46th.
Radio: (siren audible) Dupont and 46th…Don Banham steers toward the scene, but before he can get there the chase is over and so is the only potential excitement for the whole shift. A study in one big American city found that 80 percent of cops working dog watch fell asleep on the job at least once a week.
Don: I know guys that have told me that. They said, "I just can't get used to it." The times they work dog watch they hate it with a passion. Regardless of how much sleep they got during the day. Regardless of what they did they say they can't stay awake at night. I've had guys tell me that the have stopped at red lights while working and fell asleep at the red light. They were just that tired.SOUND: Radio, traffic Car drives off and x-fades into:
Music bridge: drum piece
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