I worked graveyard shift for nearly twenty years, by choice, at more than one company. Although I enjoy socializing with co-workers, my focus tends to be on the job when I’m there. Filling the wee hours makes me happier with my job than if I work normal business hours. Night after night, I would enter the office, boot the computers, do my work with limited breaks, then return home. Only rarely did I even have to answer the phone--one of my pet peeves. There’s a lot to enjoy when you work through the middle of the night. At my company, the noisy machinery would be silent. I could listen to music without earphones, and I never had to wonder if others were annoyed by my choice of tunes, for there was no one there to annoy. During the final few years, I would gleefully tune into the Art Bell show when it came on the air, and listen to wildly entertaining speculation about alien abductions, Bigfoot, government conspiracies, and what really happened to Atlantis. In addition to all the entertainment, I would depart every morning satisfied that I had earned my pay for that night, leaving a hefty stack of job tickets for management to pass to the next link in the production chain. I never had to take time off for dental checkups or parent-teacher conferences. All I had to do was schedule them early in the morning or late in the afternoon, then show up, unhurried and unstressed. My hours didn’t even affect my social life much. My friends and I would get together for breakfast frequently, or do things early in the evenings. No one throws parties on weekdays. Vacations were always a little odd, especially if I was travelling and getting together with my far-flung family. I would have to wrench my circadian rhythm into congruence with theirs, or there would be no point to visiting them. After vacations, I would quickly revert to my normal, vampyric schedule, feeling relieved. My hours gave me little to complain about. The problem I had most often was irksome, unexpected, and possibly dangerous: burned-out light bulbs. For a reason I never learned, the street light that should have illuminated the parking lot and front door of my office was dark more often than not--for years and years and years. This meant that when the bulb that hung above the building’s front door burned out, I had to make my way up the steps blindly, trailing one hand along the building’s wall for support in case I tripped. (There was no handrail.) When I reached the door, I would run my fingers over its frame until I located the keyhole by feel. Then I would insert my key, using my fingers as guides. This experience bothered me more than I realized at the time, for I dreamed of it not long ago, five years after changing to day shift. In the dream, I had to park my car in a lot about one-hundred yards from the office and pick my way down a rough path through dense woods, without so much as a moonbeam to aid me. When I reached the building, the bulb above the door was dark, as it had been so often in reality, and as I searched for the keyhole with my fingers, I muttered, “What kind of miserly boss do I have, who is too stingy to light the parking lot, too inconsiderate to light that path through the woods--much less gravel or pave it--and won’t even replace this burned-out bulb at the door?!?!” When I complained about the burned-out bulb to my husband, he always suggested I replace it myself. Doing so would have required me to wander through the warehouse in search of the company’s ladder, then lug it through the building, out the door, and position it securely on the sidewalk. Then, I would have had to mount it in darkness, carrying a large, mercury-vapor bulb. If I lost my balance and fell, I would have landed on concrete for sure; possibly on the steps, and I might have lain there unconscious until five or six in the morning! I would continue making my way to the door and into the building in nearly total darkness for days or weeks until one morning, my boss would arrive before I left, either to catch up on invoicing, or because he needed to discuss something with me. If he had to enter the building under such conditions, he would appear shaken when he reached my workstation. He never said anything when that happened but invariably, when I arrived the next night, there would be a new bulb in the fixture. All the years I worked the late shift, I never bothered to carry a flashlight for such circumstances. At this late date, I’m not sure why not. It probably had something to do with always having my hands full between the car and the door. The one thing I cannot explain for the life of me was why I didn’t think of leaving a note on the office manager’s desk: “The light over the door is burned out. Can someone replace it, please?” To read more work by this author, visit www.quillerworks.net