Living After Midnight in General

I’ve successfully flipped my schedule. Day is night, and night is day. I am a Vampire.
Back to work a few days ago. Came close to the first conflict with a shift manager.

At Wallyworld there are two cardboard compacters, alternately at the back one on the left and one on the right. That is in the weird universe through the “Associates Only” doors.
I was working the candy aisle with a kid named Travis. He has a great sense of humor, so it isn’t quite as tedious as working with those humorless drones that seem to occupy the Vampire shift.

We filled up our cardboard bin and I was running it back to the LEFT compacter. There was a line of people trying to dump cardboard (believe me, Wallyworld makes a shit-ton of cardboard).

I made a command decision to go to the other compacter, about a minutes’ walk away.
I got a ration of shit from the shift manager telling me I need to use the other compacter.

He was irrational. I almost started arguing with him about my rationale.

Nope. Not my monkeys. Not my circus.

You want me to go stand in line, then I’ll go stand in line. I get paid the same regardless of what I am doing.

My days of actually giving a shit or thinking what I am doing actually makes a difference are long gone.

Too many jobs where I thought I was indispensable, only to find myself dispensed.

I’ll give you 8.5 hours a night, you give me money.

The culture of big organizations seems to make loyalty an option. And I am tail end Gen-X.
I couldn’t be in the shit show that is the US Military now. I saw Gen. Milley sitting in front of congress yacking about “white male rage” and how the number one priority of the US Military was “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”

Wrong, you idiotic baboon. The number one priority of the US Military is lethality, combat effectiveness, and unit cohesion. Diversity, equity, and inclusion don’t even break squelch. Not even in the top 20.

I was in Korea in’84. I worked for the 8th TFW, 80th AMU. By ’84 I was a salty 22 year old, hadn’t met X1 yet. I was good at troubleshooting avionics problems on the F-16, so I ended up on the overnight, where everything gets fixed.

We rode from job to job in a panel van, you know those bread truck looking things? We’d get dropped off at a jet with our tool box and test equipment, and on occasion an M-16 and three bandoleers of NATO 5.56.

When I started I thought it was cool when I was chosen as one of the guys carrying rifles. It rapidly got old, and when I didn’t get to hump the extra twenty pounds around I was relieved.

If you were lucky, the phone in the “arch” worked and you could call back to the CSP (Central Servicing Point) and order parts or at least get the expeditor to come back and give you a ride back to pick up parts.

12 on. 12 off. Of course the buses stopped running at 1700, so there was also a 45 minute walk either side of my shift.

Every other weekend off if I was lucky. For fucking 16 months. And somehow I managed to court and marry my first wife. I am not going to go into that, because it just makes me sad, how it ended.

We would do “role call” at 1900, 7PM for civilians. Check out our toolboxes and test equipment. Maybe sneak in a cup of coffee. Get in the expediter van and start fixing jets.

A certain percentage of us carried rifles, so now you were humping rifles and bandoliers, and a toolbox and another box of test equipment. For all of which you were responsible.

At midnight those lucky enough to be not working a job or humping shit around, the expeditor would “all call” for midnight chow.

We had a choice of greasy fried chicken, greasy hamburgers, greasy cheeseburgers, greasy fried shrimp, or greasy fried fish. All with two big pickles and a side of greasy French fries.

We called them “Bag Nasties” because they came in an oily bag.

Riding around in the back of the panel van between jobs we would munch on our bag nasties. At some point someone would start humming the melody for “Living After Midnight.” After a few minutes everyone would be shout/singing “Living after midnight, rocking to the dawn, loving ‘till the morning, and I’m gone!”

Then, covered in grease we would get dropped off at jobs,

There was an arch – numbered 00, so everyone referred to it as “Balls.”

If you were lucky the phone in the arch worked. When it did, you could call in an order for parts and the dispatcher would ask where you were.

“I need a FSR receiver and a number two amp detector at balls.” Then snicker.
What the fuck, I was twenty-two. I am almost 60 and I still snicker at the memory.

Last updated July 21, 2022