Perhaps when the food dictators have universally triumphed, their next front to tackle will indeed be the sleeping one...
They've already started.
I'm a night person. I've always been a night person. I don't want to be anything OTHER than a night person. Do not wake me in the morning and think I'm going to be chipper and alert. It's not going to happen.
Yet I am told, repeatedly, that I MUST become a morning person and that staying up late is my greatest sin of all and that I'm so wrong for not conforming to the "get up and shine" morning person routine.
I have a coworker who's at work by 7:00. Yes, he gets to leave at 4:00. And I'm still there. BUT, I slept a little later in the morning. Plus, I'm at work at a time that helps those employees we have in other time zones; I was able to train someone in the Phillipines because I was still around when it was morning his time.
Seriously. Give it a break. Get your own dang self up at any time you please. But leave me alone.
As a fellow night owl, I hear ya!
But at the same time, I finally (mostly) conquered an insomnia issue that's plagued me my whole life.[1] It turns out that if I constrain myself tightly to a schedule (bed by midnight), my body grows adjusted to it. It had *never* done that before. For the past month, I have had ONE bout of 6Am insomnia... because I stayed up voluntarily to 1:30AM.
[1] To give you an idea how bad, when I was a teenager, I once couldn't sleep for an entire week. And I mean a literal 7-day 168-hour week where I didn't even nap. After day three, the hallucinations were interesting. After day five, they were pretty much gone. After day seven, I finally dropped off and slept for 24 straight hours.
Man, I thought I was bad!
If I really need to, I can adjust my sleep schedule - it usually takes a few sleep-deprived days or medicated nights, but I can do it. I am never - or rarely - really at my best in the morning, though.
For a couple of years, I worked in an office (on the US East Coast) that ended up contractually obligated to have someone on hand to provide phone/email support to folks on the West Coast (3 hours behind us) until 5:30 pm their time - so until 8:30 our time. We started off cycling through different people taking the late shift each night, but everyone else hated it. Also, we had a task that had to be done for our client at about 5pm every day, and for some reason the client rep really liked me (he was fine with everyone else, but really liked me best). Since I was a night owl anyway, I didn't mind staying late, I finally just suggested that I just work the skewed shift every day, leaving everyone else to their preferred 9-to-5 routine.
My boss could NOT figure out why I liked that shift so much, until I went on vacation for a week and he was covering the late shift. He lived almost an hour from the office, so would normally have to get up quite early to get in. That week, he could sleep in, miss the worst of the traffic, go out for drinks with his friends after work, and still be well rested when he got in the next day. After that, he understood.
My current bosses like that I'm a night owl - need someone to stay late, or come in at some weird hour of the evening? No problem, Jedi will do it!
OK, back to your regularly scheduled diversion...
