Working Overtime and Getting Nothing Done

Posted by dwallace on August 8, 2013 in 20th Reunion, Overtime |

It’s amazing how far you can get off track sometimes. Life happens and then when you look up, three months have gone by. So many things get in the way of what you really want to be doing.

My last three months have been filled with: job interviews for jobs that I never got, arguments over money that I don’t remember what we needed it for, planning my 20th year high school reunion, which most of the people I hung around aren’t even coming and working a shit-ton of overtime to pay for a trip to Las Vegas (for the reunion) which I’m really not all that excited about even going to.

I’ve already been to Vegas seven times and only two of my “real friends,” are coming to the reunion. To be fair, the other people who are coming are Facebook friends. No offense to them, but I would rather go somewhere with my wife that we’ve never been before than go to Vegas for the eighth time.
But I know you only have one shot to have a 20th reunion, so that’s why I’m doing it. I don’t want to look back in 20 years and say, “We were going to do it, but most of my friends decided to wait until they were 38 years old to have kids, so we didn’t have one.”

The only reason I picked Vegas as the reunion spot was because when me and my wife were back in Hawaii two years ago, which is where I graduated high school, over 20 people said that we should have the reunion in Vegas. And now only two of them are coming. (The other seven are people who I’ve kept in touch with through Facebook, so it’s not all bad.)

It’s just that I’ve been busting my ass to make the trip work and now my wife can’t even go because we really can’t afford for both of us to make the trip. I know what most of the guys are thinking, “Poor thing, going to Vegas without your wife. Cry me a river.” But I don’t gamble anymore and I don’t whore around on my wife, so what’s the point?

I’ve worked 57 hours of overtime in the last two weeks. The days have started sliding together. I never really know, or care, what day it is as long as I don’t miss the shift that I signed up for. Plus I’m doing all of the overtime on the midnight shift, so my sleep schedule is completely fucked-up.

We are not allowed to read at work, even though we often literally do nothing but sit in a chair and get up every 15 minutes to shine a light in a little window to make sure someone isn’t hanging in their cell. So I have to fight boredom and sleep at the same time. The only way I’ve found I can do that is by leaning against a table and doing push-ups, which gets old after fifty reps.

I used to have a perfect schedule. I would wake up at 5:40 am, be at work by 7:00 am, then I would work-out from 3:00 pm to 3:45 pm, come home and get the dog out by 4:15 pm. Then I would have 45 minutes to do whatever I wanted around the house, get in a power-nap in from 5:00 pm to 5:30 pm, wake up and go get my daughter from pre-school by 6:00 pm, take her to the park or let her ride her bike, then cook dinner and have it ready before my wife got home by 7:15 pm, then get my daughter a bath by 8:00 pm, tell her (not read) a story by 9:00, and then be in bed by 9:30 to 10:00 pm.

Now that’s all out the window because I’m working more overtime in the last two weeks than I’ve done literally in two years.

But the one thing working all this overtime has made me realize is, I might not be able to read at work, but at least I can still write.

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