The week of 2nd to 9th August was my week of out-of-hours duty, which involved three of us being on the ward at 4pm and leaving at 8.30am-ish*, sometimes with long enough breaks in the working time to have a nap, but more than once involving me being awake for that entire length of time and on the ward for all but an hour of it.
It's been a week and I still haven't broken the night shift pattern.
This is a complete pain for more than one reason - the obvious one, of course, is that with this kind of sleep schedule it's nigh impossible to get anything done, since Cambridge retail and public service jobs alike usually pack their employees off home in time for the evening news. It also means that I consistently sleep poorly thanks to the bright sunlight and sounds of overexcited screaming children** filtering through the window, and so don't actually feel like doing anything when I wake up.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason it's taking so long to recover is that my body is desperately trying to catch up on the sleep lost over the OOH week with this week of crappy interrupted sleep, which I assume is on roughly the same level of futility as trying to gain weight by keeping to a celery-only diet.
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* Please note that without naps, the maximum amount of sleep possible on this schedule (without being late) is about 5-6 hours. So, yeah.
** Young children are known to scream a lot while playing. The frequency of this occurrence is inversely proportional to the number of hours of sleep that have been obtained prior to their appearance outside, and has been shown to correlate with the number of times the exposed subject mutters statements along the lines of "You [mumble], give you somethin to fuggin scream about you [extended mumble]" during their fitful sleep.
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