Never worked a proper nightshift, but I guess I am one of those night owls to which you allude; unless something is stopping me I tend to gravitate to sleeping at 5am, rising early afternoon and that's fine. But a few times have had very intense periods of dj-img which fucked my body clock that little bit more. Stuck waking at 5, 6, even 8pm, sadly out of step with people and, worse, the sun. Said to Liza we need to sort this out and she just said why, we got another allnighter in two days.
And she was right I'm sure... but regardless, living without the sun or people cannot help but be depressing. Waking to see the sun go down engenders an immediate sinking feeling and so if my body as stuck on that cycle I try and fuck with it one way or another and see if I can switch things around a little.
As for proper nightshifts, I has a friend who was a night porter in a country hotel. We would drop in and help him "clean out the taps" or build ourselves five decker sandwiches in the kitchen. He also used to like going outside and smashing golf balls at the place from a distance I would have not described as safe. From pointless acts of vandalism and petty theft I am sorry to report that his crimes did begin to grow in size. It's pretty hard to keep an accurate inventory of beer from the tap (although you would have thought that they would have been a little bit surprised to learn that the actual amount on hand was a nice round zero quite so often) which was why he would steal that as a matter of course even if he was not thirsty. In fact one could even describe it as a matter of principle - if one had the same twisted and malevolent pseudo-principles as him.
That was how thefts started at the hotel. The obvious next step was to help himself to the odd bottle of vodka (or gin) from (or rum) the store cupboards (or whiskey) and the (or whisky) cellar. And when you think of it, if they don't miss one they are hardly likely to miss two are they? So, I am sorry to say, it became not uncommon for a fair number of bottles to mysteriously walk out of that cellar.
The next step was one that I have to admit a certain grudging respect for; I believe it was my brother who was kindly helping Gavin by carrying up the stairs a couple of huge bags full to bursting with assorted spirits (I assume he naively believed that there was going to be a huge party in the hotel the next day, maybe a large number of people were due to check in... in fact a very large group) - Gav was already carrying a prodigious load himself so it was a good job Rob was there - when, to his dismay, the milkman pulled into the yard catching them as red-handed as they could possibly be.
I imagine Rob was about to leg it the fuck out of there and bravely let Gavin deal with the problem (like his namesake Brave Brave Sir Robin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail come to think of it), when Gavin quickly reassured him, there was no need to worry at this point, there was simply too much booze to carry and so he had struck a deal with the milkman who would kindly stick them in his van and deliver them to Gav's house when he passed it on his round - minus a small commission for himself of course. And he didn't just deliver to Gavin, he also dropped a couple off at the house of the guy who worked at the all-night garage down the road. The reason for this was cos in that garage much of the shelves were covered by a security camera, but there were a few blind spots which relied on the alertness of the guy working there to prevent theft. Sadly however the guy seemed to be somewhat sleepy on occasions when Gavin was shopping and so Gavin would often emerge from there carrying enormous amounts of nighttime snacks that I'm almost certain he forgot to pay for.
So the hotel did in fact tolerate this for some time. The aim of both Gavin and his fellow night porter was to keep continuously sucking away at that beautiful, generous golden teat, extracting as many golden eggs as the golden sheep would defecate for them, but avoiding ever actually slaying the beast with the kind of massive bloodletting that even the management of this place couldn't ignore. It seemed to actually be working for quite some time despite the fact that to the casual observer they looked like deep throat gobbling on a hosepipe on full power.
I think that the two guys used to alternate nights as a rule but sometimes they would do half a night each, the point being that there was enough overlap between their shifts that they could coordinate their planned crimes to minimise visibility.
"I absolutely fucking rinsed that secret supply under the stairs last night, maybe best you let that cunt grow back a bit before you get in there matey"
"OK, thanks kindly for the warning my friend, the timing is perhaps not unfortuitous in that I must confess of late my family grows weary of champagne, perhaps this week is indeed the opportune moment for our youngest to develop a taste for tequila"
As inevitably as marijuana leads to heroin, petty crime leads to harder crime, and soon this sort of huge local crime ring was not enough for them. They sort of semi-seriously began to raise the possibility of robbing the safe at the end of the month and vanishing into the night with a substantial sum of money. I forget the name of the other porter, think it was Bill or something similar to that, either way his "plan" in their oft-discussed fantasy heist was noteworthy for its simplicity and lack of extraneous details. I believe it boiled down to "break the safe open, grab the money and fuck off to his sister's place in the Inner Hebrides."
And one day, in a crime that as yet remains unsolved, someone did "do the safe" - I know Gavin had his suspicions that it may have been Bill. Just little things that he let slip such as "I'm really gonna do the safe tonight, I'm not joking" and his sudden disappearance to the Inner Hebrides got Gavin's antenna twitching, however they were never able to actually prove anything (clearly a case for Poirot) and they fired them both to be sure so that was the end of that particular chapter in Gavin's extraordinary sleazy and corrupt life.
