Buddy story · Shift work
Two night shifts, one time zone apart
Noah and Ash both work nights and both had given up on a Sunday-evening format that assumed a Monday-to-Friday life.
- Paired
- January 2025
- Cadence
- Whenever the break falls
- Status
- ongoing
Kiki holds the night circles and had watched a run of shift-working members get paired with day-working members and quietly drop out. So she started pairing nights with nights, and this was the first one.
They do not have a day. They have an arrangement: whoever gets a break first sends something, and the other replies when they can, and nobody is owed a reply inside any particular window. Noah says this sounds chaotic and is in fact the least stressful correspondence he has ever had.
Most of what they write about is not medication at all. It is the thing that neither of their families understand, which is that a three-in-the-afternoon breakfast is a real meal and not a failure of organisation, and that a week of nights and a week of days is two different bodies stitched together.
Ash had the harder run of the two: a fortnight in the autumn where the fatigue was severe enough that she saw her GP about it, correctly, and it turned out to be iron. Noah's contribution was to keep sending the same short messages through the fortnight when she was not replying.
Nobody who works days can understand why the meal at three in the afternoon matters so much. Ash did not need it explained.
He kept writing when I had gone quiet, and he did not make me apologise for going quiet. That is the entire thing.