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What to Do on the Nightshift Besides Work?
jchawk asks: "I currently work the over night shift for an ISP. After mid-night we receive about two calls, and they are usually from friends or people who cannot get their email. I was wondering what others who have been in this situation do to entertain themselves on this long and boring shift, because stealing candy out of the vending machine has gotten old."
A good portion of the time I am there, I have lots to do (changes happen at night, and it is the world's largest NFS installation (or so I've heard)), but for a lot of the nights, I just have to watch patrol/logfiles and keep an eye on the systems.
I can't write code for my own projects, as they own everything I write when I am at work.
I can't bring in my laptop, as I don't have a pass to get it back out of the building.(so, no games except the ones on my visor, and in xemacs)
What do I do?
- Get to know the night staff - I eat my lunch at about the time
the janitors finish, so I usually sit around with them and talk for a
while. I've heard some amazing stories
- Read manuals - check the tops of racks of equipment that outside
people (like EMC) maintain. Sometimes they'll leave the manuals there.
- Read documentation - SGI and
Apple have lots of cool reading,
not to mention Other
Places.
- Write throwaway code - They may own it, so just try things out.
See how fast you can get a parallel matrix multiply to go when
you spread it over all 16 or so of the processors of a nice beefy box.
- Automate things - write scripts to make life easier for everyone,
and give yourself even more free time to worry about!
- Read good books - I've been catching up on my reading backlog.
- Check HR's web page to double check your benefits - I found a nice
discount on books from fatbrain that I had missed.
- See if the zone where managers sit has better toilet paper in the
bathrooms.
And remember - if all else fails, you can always turn to math. The Unknowable and it's cool lisp based proofs made the nights just fly by this past week, and this is an old standby that has gotten me through many nights.--
Well, you might want to try posting silly questinons to "Ask Slashdot" to kill time ;-)
I don't know about you, but it seems to me that the middle of the night, when nobody is around, is the perfect time to run systems maintainance tasks. Quite apart from the tasks which would result in downtime (upgrading servers/network/etc.) the middle of the night is the ideal time to run tasks which might result in decreased performacen -- network backups, checking your server logs for any security issues, etc.
Ideally, it should be the day shift which is long and boring, because that's when you shouldn't be touching anything which could possibly cause downtime.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
There's quite a lot of things you could do:
If you can't find a book you like, you could try some of the following, which I have read, or am planning on reading:
Thats my advice, anyway.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Order a pizza and run a freeciv server. That never gets old for me.
Another great idea for boring nightshifts is to hold a make-believe radio show. Seriously, this can get entertaining, especially if you invite new and interesting guests to your "show".
If things at your job are getting old, then maybe it's time for a new job. :)
--
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
Use the time! You're getting paid to sit in front of a computer.
Write a book. Write some software. Learn something. Do something.
Most people count the hours until they're away from the workplace, so they can finally have some time to themselves to get their own thing done. And here it's being handed to you on a silver platter, with a paycheck to boot!
Reminds me of the kids who'd get bored two days into summer vacation. A whole world out there and nothing to do. Sheesh.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
pr0n
;) But come on.. you work at night at an ISP? Alone with a nice, fat pipe? A machine with all the alt.binaries.* in the room next to you? After midnight?
Sorry
Oh yeah. Bow bow.
Well, usually I sleep at night time. It gets quite dark outside so there's not much to do. People need to sleep so I figure, hey, why not sleep at night.