NightShiftTales

The Regular in Booth Six I’ve cooked nights at the Starlight Diner for going on seven years. The Starlight is on Route 9 in Coventry, New York, between a closed Midas shop and a self-storage place that’s been “coming soon”…

The Call Light in Room 214 I’ve been a CNA for eleven years, six of them on overnight at Maplecrest Care Center. I work the 10 PM to 6 AM shift, Wing B, which covers eighteen rooms on the north…

Pump 4, Every Night The Sinclair station on Route 191 is open 24 hours. It is the last gas for thirty-one miles if you are headed north toward the pass, which means it gets a steady stream of travelers during…

Dock 7 Has Been Closed Since 2019 The Harcourt Distribution Center has twelve loading docks. Eleven of them are active. Dock 7 has been closed since October 2019, which means the bay door is down and locked, the dock plate…

Rack 14, Row C I work overnight operations at a colocation facility outside Richmond. We run about four hundred racks across two floors of a building that used to be a paper mill before it was gutted and converted in…

Route 9 Terminates at Wickford Landing I drive the 11:40 PM departure out of Central Station — the last bus on Route 9. It runs through the industrial district, past the hospital, along the river road, and terminates at Wickford…

The Plant Never Really Sleeps People think a factory shuts down when the day shift leaves. It doesn’t, not really. The machines cool down and the lines stop but the building itself keeps going — compressors cycling, coolant pumping, the…