NightShiftTales

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…

The Overhead You Don’t Question In a hospital, you learn to triage noise the same way you triage patients. Some sounds require immediate action and some sounds are background and after a while your brain sorts them automatically, without conscious…

We Ran the Call. The Address Wasn’t There. I’ve been in EMS for eleven years. Six of those on nights, which means I’ve been to enough dark houses, enough wrong turns, enough places where the GPS stutters and you’re reading…