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JudgeRoyBean's avatar

Anne, you outdid yourself! The best newsletter EVER!! (I just read this, and it is WAYYYYY too long!) Be forewarned:

Five-alarm Comment: “You want you have more that you want to accomplish then is conceivably, physically possible. So then you’re always feeling under pressure! If your list is never all checked off, you’ll always have something to do.” That statement is above the entrance to the prison camps in the gulags across Russia!! NO THANK YOU! I agree 100% with Abraham Lincoln: “My father taught me to work, but not to love it. I never did like to work, and I don't deny it. I'd rather read, tell stories, crack jokes, talk, laugh -- anything but work.”

*Disclosure: 23&Me says that I’m majority Italian (but also a tinge of Jewish). David’s attitude might be cultural: “There’s a famous scene in Eat Pray Love where Julia Roberts’s character berates herself that all she has done during her three weeks in Rome is eat and learn a few words of Italian. ‘You don’t know how to enjoy yourself,” retort her Italian companions. They go on to describe the concept of dolce far niente – the sweetness of doing nothing. Italians, they proclaim, ‘are masters of it’.” THAT’S ME!

Best EXPERT Sentence Regarding Sleep: “You can’t go from the business of the day to unconsciousness,” EXACTLY!

1ST Runner-up: “Flexing that fantasy muscle allows the business muscle to relax.” I’m 69, retired from EVERYTHING, and my “fantasy muscles” are in the best shape of my life!!

Winner Miss Congeniality: “So if you see a raccoon in mid-day, it's FINE, he is probably just going for a powwow with the Series B investors.” Just hilarious!!!

Winner BEST CAREER ADVICE EVER: “And I’m thinking I could maybe monetize this. If I could be paid to be sleepy.”

Best Entrepreneurial Tip: “It’s hard to get off the couch or get off the floor. I do a lot of floor lying.” That’s even worse when you have to go upstairs to sleep! Every night my wife and I joke that one of those stair-lift chairs, that are on every commercial these days (along with the come-ons for “Medicare Part C” with Joe Namath and Jimmy JJ. Walker) are not enough! You have to get off the couch to get to the lift-chair to go upstairs. People need a couch that has a button on the side that you push, even in a stupor, and the couch magically moves over to and up the stairs, depositing you into your bed, osrt of like a front-loader dumping detritus. You might have to sleep a while in your clothes and on top of the covers, but the worst part of the job is taken care of!

That information about the sleep-habits of animals, squirrels, pigeons, raccoons and rats is the best! Now I know! We have squirrels active all year long and they behave EXACTLY as described! I doubt I would pet a raccoon, but I’m sure it could be done safely by anyone who has already, sadly and unfortunately, lost their fingers.

For the last 10 years of my career, I worked 3rd-shift, from 10:00 pm to 8:00 a.am., 7 shifts on / 7 shifts off (typical of hospital workers.) I don’t think your circadian rhythm ever resets. Mine hasn’t in the almost 3 years I’ve been privileged to be removed from the mart of competitive commerce. I sleep like the rat: “Rats typically sleep on and off during the day—about four hours at a stretch—and then stay up all night, partying on the subway tracks.”

***Suggestion: Anne, interview 3rd-shift workers on their sleep habits and the challenges of 3rd shift. 3rd-shift workers, especially in hospitals, are like Ginger Rogers: They do everything that Fred did, but backwards, and in high heels. Patients never realize that for half of their daily stay, they are being protected from Death by Zombies, on 3rd-shift. My motto was, “There’s no cryin’ and no dyin’ on my shift. You’ll live to see another sunrise. Sunset is someone else’s problem.”

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Caroline DeVane's avatar

My favorite issue to date! But I feel that with every one I read. My take home messages: 1) start taking a “disco nap” and 2) I resonate more than I imagined with the Naked Cowboy

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