Night shifts working in the old "cold room" computer rooms was an awesome job as a university student. In a average twelve-hour shift, there was maybe six hours of work if you really stretched things and did a little extra. Yeah, there were the panicky emergency nights where you're literally running around fixing stuff, but on average there was six hours of time to fill waiting for jobs to finish, printouts to print, and error messages to not pop up. Nighttime TV sucks. Nighttime radio sucks. There wasn't always studying to do or a paper to write. And couldn't be out of the room for longer than a longish bathroom break length of time (5 minutes maybe) just in case a problem happened. That meant plenty of time to:
- - Chair race with the security guard around the cold room floor. Excellent rolling surface! Avoid the giant vaxen and Big Blue Monolith for higher score.
- - Go for a walk up and down the stairs. Six flights! 14 stairs on each flight except between the 2nd and 3rd floor, where one flight had 13. Never worked that one out. Back to the room in under five minutes.
- - Go down to the weight room, grab a couple dumbbells, bring them back up . Random dumbbell exercises in the room. Put them back in the weight room before the 5am fitness nutters come in.
- - Sitting on an operating high speed line printer acts like one of those vibrate-the-weight-off machines. Okay, I never did that one, but female colleagues may have. Or my girlfriend. Allegedly.
Great job that I'm not sure even exists anymore. But I was the Buff Operator From Hell for those few years.
