Wake up, you sleepy-head....

[SoCalDem]

http://www.sunjournal.com/bplus/story/1046029


Hey Sleepy, think air traffic controllers are the only ones craving a nap? Dream on!
By Mark LaFlamme, Staff Writer
Jun 19, 2011 12:00 am

It's the silences that get you.

The silences between emergency calls, incoming planes or products rolling down the line. Those stretches of time and quiet make a person want to nap, and today more than ever, napping is taboo. It happens every time an air traffic controller falls asleep on the job. The common nap becomes news. The public expresses horror and some government agency launches a million-dollar study to determine why we're so tired and what can be done about it.

If you've ever worked the overnight shift, you don't need a study. You know that when the world goes dark and there's a break in the action, you want to sleep.

"I guess I made it through the nights," said emergency dispatcher Andrew Hart, "playing solitaire, chatting with co-workers a lot. And the 3:30 a.m. Dunkin' Donuts run." For a year, Hart manned a radio at the 911 dispatch center in Auburn. When a building is burning down or stores are getting robbed, it's not hard to stay awake. Take away the drama, though, and the body wants to go to sleep. "In Lewiston-Auburn, it was tough. Come in at 10:30 p.m. and usually it would be constant until around 2 a.m.," said Hart, who later went on to work for a dispatch center in Austin, Texas. "This would usually quiet down from 20-25 phone calls an hour to one-to-two. Radio traffic would also slow considerably."

And then? The radios would fall silent. The world outside went dark, a signal to the human body that it's time to sleep. That's when you're supposed to sleep, right? When it's dark outside? "The body is not accustomed to sleeping during the daytime," says Thaddeus Shattuck, a sleep specialist and psychiatrist at St. Mary's Regional Medical Center in Lewiston. "The body is just not programmed to do it."
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