I am supposed to be at work now, but I am not. The reason I am not at work is because I have not had any sleep since yesterday, which means I would be dangerous at work. And not just at work, but also driving my car to and from work. It is ironic that yesterday I slept for 13 hours, and yet last night I got no sleep whatsoever, and yet that is the result of random shift work. The affect of shift work on the human body is not something that non-shift workers can truely understand, but the net effect is that it makes you incredibly tired most of the time. Sometimes this means you can sleep for long periods of time, and other times, due to the neccessity of constantly shifting sleep patterns, you cannot sleep at all, which makes you all the more tired.

Talking to people who have retired from the industry, it would appaer that most people take six or seven months before their sleep patterns return to normal. A year or so on, people who have left the shift work certainly look several years younger than when they were working with us.