August 26–September 4, 2004 — Sleep

I had a lot to do before September 1. I was moving, for a start, and at work there were two or three pretty major projects due the last few days of August or the first few days of September. So I didn’t sleep very much. There were a few nights when I didn’t sleep at all, and I only slept four or five hours most other nights, which made the nights without sleep worse.

My first sleepless night wasn’t quite sleepless, with me napping from 5:30 am until a bit after 7:00 am on the office couch. I brought blankets along for the night, but I didn’t use them because when I’ve only time to sleep for ninety minutes or so, getting comfortable isn’t really a priority. I slept fully clothed and quite soundly with no preparation aside from folding up a sweater to use as a pillow.

And I accomplished a lot, really. I did all the work that absolutely needed to be done that night, and I kept working until pretty late the next afternoon.

The problem with not sleeping is that it leaves me without the capacity for common sense. So while most people would go home and try to sleep after working all night and then working another eight-hour shift, I decided I needed to rent a shampooer vacuum so that I could clean my new apartment before moving in. I’d visited and seen that it was pretty gross, and I knew there would be few other opportunities to properly clean the carpets before there was furniture on top of them. In retrospect, though, my health would have been better served by unconsciousness.

After calling a grocery store to reserve a vacuum, I struggled to stay awake on my way there. When I arrived to sign out the vacuum and to pay, I wasn’t very coherent, and I couldn’t remember my old or new address. I gave the office address, and that seemed alright. I gave my health card as ID; it lists my first name as Michael. The person renting me the vacuum started to call me Michael and I didn’t really notice. Then I paid with a credit card that had my first name as Greg. He gave me a suspicious look, but I wasn’t conscious enough to explain the discrepancy.

I forget how we got past that part. The next thing I remember was him telling me it was very easy to operate the vacuum and that instructions were on the side. Then he laughed when he found out I was taking it on public transit. He wished me luck.

I made it to the apartment more or less without incident only to find that most of the instructions on the side of the vacuum had been scratched off. There were illustrations, but only about one word in five was legible in the written instructions. It took me a long time to figure out how to assemble it and to make it work. Eventually I managed.

For all of that, the vacuum worked pretty well. The more disgusting stains mostly went away, and I felt better about the idea of one day walking on the ones that didn’t because I knew I’d done all I could. There was a lengthy set of pictograms that seemed to be describing how the vacuum was to be cleaned after use. I squinted at them a bit and decided unplugging it was as far as my vacuum aftercare was going to take me. I went home and slept.

Five days later I went into the office planning another sleepover, but this time I didn’t manage the ninety minutes of sleep I’d allowed myself the week before.

The twist this time was that while I had enough work to keep me in the office all night, it was September 1 and I had no means of moving my belongings to my new apartment even though someone was moving the next day into what had been my room for the summer.

So at 9:00 pm I took a break from work and went up to where I’d been living for the summer to spend about four hours moving all of my belongings from my room on the second floor down to the basement, where I was told they could remain for the week it would take me to find a means of getting them out of that basement and into my new basement.

After four hours of dragging boxes down stairs and taking furniture apart, I filled my backpack with enough of my belongings to get me through a few days of sleeping on couches and floors. Then I went back to work.

As I walked down Queen Street at 3:00 am clutching a pillow and a bag full of clothes, I knew things could be a lot worse for me, but it was hard not to feel demoralized and a bit heartsick. I had already worked for twelve hours and moved all of my belongings into a basement; now I was going back to work for at least eight more hours, and I wouldn’t have a bed to sleep on when I finished.

I guess I’ve just had better moments.

Ten hours later I couldn’t work anymore. I wasn’t quite done everything, but I was far enough along that there weren’t really consequences for not finishing the bits that weren’t finished. I went to my new apartment, unfolded a sleeping bag in a corner and slept on it, fully clothed, for four hours.

Then I bought food.

Then I didn’t have anything else to do, so I went back to work...

I’ve more time for sleep now, and while I still haven’t slept enough to make up for those three weeks, I’ve slept at least four hours each night since.

There have been funnier, less depressing moments brought on by my regimen of sleep deprivation, like the time I biked into an SUV while not paying attention. He didn’t cut me off or anything, he was just waiting to turn. I wasn’t going very quickly; I just coasted into him. When I picked myself up and biked by, he seemed sort of terrified, which was less funny; I had been pretty amused by the whole situation until I saw the driver’s face.

But I guess that’s the moral of all this: Stop sleeping, and even biking into an SUV is a bit of a laugh. Now I just need to find a way to make database design as pleasant and entertaining an experience as that.

In conclusion, I’d rather bike into inanimate objects than wake up and go to work in the morning.

I think that’s where this had been going all along.