Working outage hours are long, hard work where all you do is eat, sleep, drag your very tired butt to work and then work your ass off (while trying to be safe and meet all the company milestones), go home, try to eat, say good night to the spouse and kids (either two or four legged), drop dead tired into bed, get jarred awake by the alarm (if you are lucky and can sleep that long or at all) then do it all over again for how ever many days in a row you have to to keep the good paying job. The job has to be good paying because no one else would put up with that kinds of shit for small pay. After a few weeks even then you start to wonder if the pay is enough to put up with all you do!
On your day off - if you are lucky enough to get one - you eat, sleep, do laundry (or take it to the local laundromat - and yes the laundromat or kids do it when we are in outage, I don't have time to do laundry, and try not to bite any one's head off. If you don't get a day off, you still must fit in the laundry even if it means driving to the laundromat to pick it up.
We've found sleep to be a precious commodity. The closer we can stay to work the few extra hours of sleep we can get. After the first outage I found out it doesn't pay to be he-man or she-ra - give me the closest hotel! It is worth every penny spent! Most hotels give a long term rate that is much cheaper. Ken go his for $50 a day for the next Beaver Valley outage. I don't have to clean, cook, or do laundry! The maids are very accommodating about cleaning the room for a $20 or $30 tip per week - money very well spent. And sleep can be had by all - unless Ken snores. :) And we are much safer off the road than driving exhausted.
Anyway, I digress. Hitting the wall. I never understood the wall until my first outage and the last month of it on night shift. The wall is sheer exhaustion. You can not do another thing without sleep. Tears run down your face you can't even think of eating without wanting to puke, I wear my vampire sunglasses even at night because all the lights are too bright, every fiber in your being is screaming at you pain, pain, PAIN. You can do nothing after you hit the wall but sleep. You will do it one way or another - if you do somehow manage to make it to work, you will not be able to function. I've been standing up straight with my eyes open and I have been asleep. The body can only take so much before it WILL find ways to sleep. Ken has had more time at this and recognized the signs of the wall that first outage and tried to have me take off the next night which was the last night of our outage. All I saw were dollar signs. I didn't listen. I should have. I hit the wall and ended up calling off anyway. I slept 36 hours. I'd sleep, get up and eat a bowl of cereal, then sleep some more.
There are signs before you hit the wall. I'm getting better at recognizing them but I am not perfect yet. I do know enough now to say I've had it - I am not fit for duty, I need to go home and sleep. The signs are confusion - you check yourself two, three, four or more times wondering if you are doing that task correctly when you know your job and know how to do that task with ease normally. You babble not making any sense. I get weepy - I am not normally a crying person at all. Every little thing upsets me emotionally when in my normal frame of mind whatever the thing was would not even faze me. You fall asleep anywhere you can and don't even realize you've been asleep - a blackout type of thing. You just nod off and don't even know it. And I do mean anytime - I've even done it on the road driving and my guardian angels have rescued me. I get hyperactive - so much energy I think I am superwoman and can go forever - that is a very bad sign - it isn't long and my body just quits and I hit the wall. One sign is bad but any more than one and within a few hours I will hit the wall. When this happened at Beaver Valley the last time, Ken pointed it out and when I thought about it I agreed. I left two hours early and then slept for 16 hours straight.
After outages are no picnic either. I never understood why Ken would sleep for 36 hours. I do now. It is all your body can do - sleep, get up eat, then sleep some more.
Outage hours are cumulative. They take a physical and emotional tole on you. It is even more evident when working night shift. Not only are you dealing with long hours, then add on top of that trying to switch back to days. I have a much harder time coming back to day shift. It takes me almost a month before I don't get up in the middle of the night to eat or just be up because I'm used to being awake. It also takes me months after to sleep soundly again. Emotionally, you are still so exhausted for so long after the outage - much longer than you think you should be - all the little things in life that normally would just slide by irritate you and make you angry. Family life suffers. During the two year outage so many family's suffered. When we finally restarted - I heard so many comments about how they didn't know their sons, daughters, and wives or husbands because two years had been robbed from their lives. At the time we all didn't know from one day to the next if we even would have a job the next day let alone the next week or month. We couldn't even see to the next year. Family holidays were non-existent, special occasions went by without the DB employee there. More than one marriage ended in divorce because of it.
I never understood until I became a DB employee what outages really are like and the tole they take on your health, family and sleep. I couldn't understand. I can see both sides now. The family at home has issues to deal with too. We call it the Davis-Besse widow's syndrome. It applies to all outage families.
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