and I lived to tell about it!

I did it y'all!

I never say "y'all", but it felt extremely appropriate for some reason.

Last night I worked my first (will there be more??) overnight inventory shift at Macy's.  I was worried about it for days in advance.  My biggest concern was learning how to move my sleeping schedule around just enough to be able to make it through the shift and not die in a horrific car crash on the way home, but also keep it "normal" enough that I'd be able to wake up at 6am on Monday morning for my first day at The Job.

Well, so far so good!

I took a nap from 1 to 3pm yesterday and then got to Macy's to start my shift at 9pm.  None of us got to leave until 6am.  6:05am for me, exactly.  And since I live too far away for circumstances such as this, I didn't actually get to sleep in my bed until 7:30 this morning!  But here I am, awake after 5 hours and feeling pretty so, so. My goal now is to stay awake for the rest of the day so that I can get a lot of sleep tonight in preparation for the aforementioned Job.

The overall experience was actually pretty entertaining in that "here's something I've never done before" kind of way.

More than 20 of us were each given a "Scanpal 2" ...

and then split up into two sections of the store with one assignment... "Scan every single item."

It had similar ups and downs to an elementary sleepover.  We started out with a lot of energy; joking, laughing and teasing each other.  Then, with each turn of the clock's hour hand, our energy steadily depleted until we were no longer human's with individual thought, but scanning, silent drones instead.  All that could be heard for hours at a time was the continual chorus of the spontaneous "beep..beep-eep..beep.....beep" ringing throughout the store.

After our "lunch break" which took place at 2:30am, we were restored to much livelier versions of ourselves, much like young adolescents at a slumber party after ingesting some late-night sugar.

Here's where things got interesting for me.

At the end of my lunch hour I drank one of those tiny 5 hour energy drinks and by 3:15am I was a shaky, rambling fool, I tell you! Really, I think it was a combination of 3 things:

1. The effects of all that caffeine crammed into one tiny bottle

2. My complete lack of sleep (bloodshot eyes ensuing)

3. The aftereffect of lifting heavy kitchen item after heavy kitchen item

Sure, one box of expensive silverware isn't that heavy, but by the time you lift the 153rd box, it feels like someone at the factory decided to just start making all the cutlery out of cement.  And this was just the first of many heavy things!  Around 4am I'd moved on to huge stacks of microwaves, blenders and coffeemakers; all conveniently hiding their bar codes on the absolute bottom of their boxes.  Eventually I couldn't even initial my name in straight lines anymore.  As I watched my hand all a quiver, attempting to write my item numbers and initials after every fixture, it felt more like I was watching a toddler learn how to hold a pencil for the very first time.

At this point I decided that the best thing for my overall health and well-being was to steer clear of anything weighing over 5lb.  All this left for me were endless displays of fancy china.  A sane person would automatically conclude that the last thing shaky hands should hold is fancy china, but at this point I probably wasn't your average sane person. 

And I even drove myself home! .... I think.