For the last few months, I have been on a bit of an odd schedule at work – they have me in the office from 2 PM until 11 PM Sunday through Thursday.

This is actually a shift with a lot of advantages, but being eight hours out-of-sync with the world does eventually catch up with you.  It’s not quite as bad as my hard-core MMO days where I was trying to get by on four hours of sleep a night and everything felt very far away all of the time, but there is a certain… disconnect, and it’s hard to overcome the feeling that people I’ve worked with for years have become ghosts that I only see for an hour or two before they go home and the building empties down to only the dozen or so of us who drew the short straw.

Fortunately I have found coping mechanisms.