What sorts of jobs would require someone to only work night shift? Does anybody here work jobs on the night shift and if so what kind of things do you do? My MC needs a job but it has to be at night (for plot reasons) and he's got no qualifications so he can't be a doctor or anything like that. I was thinking security guard or shelf stacker, it needs to be something with as little human contact as possible.
Office cleaners clean at night when the offices are empty and that can be a solitary job. I've seen people running little street cleaner machine around parking lots at night. Donut making isn't hard to learn. One of my first jobs was making donuts at night at Dunkin Donuts though you do usually have a few customers in the morning before your shift is over. A lot of bakeries and bread factories make their wares during the night.
I've done part-time newspaper print night shifts several times. The problem is you can not move an inch from, say, the conveyor belt when stacking the newspaper packs because it sputs the packs incessantly. MC could work in the store house and manipulate the palettes - that not as bad and physically demanding. I think any kind of work in a store house can be done at night, forwarding and transportation, for instance.
Thanks Stevesh and Hwaigon Those are great ideas and definitely sound like something my MC would do. Just to pick one now!
Security Guard is definitely your best bet. Gas Station clerk also works. Janitor in a big office building maybe.
A little late to the party here, but any environment that runs a 24/7/365 operation, like (from personal experience) a pulp and paper mill, police/security, nursing/medical, club bouncer, club dancer...
I thought security guards were usually ex-police? So not a candidate if our MC has no qualifications? Ditto for @molliemoogle's police or nursing. And nursing/medical, club bouncer, etc., fail due to having a little bit of human contact! Thinking about it, I love the idea of a bouncer who has no human contact!
Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I haven't decided exactly what he's gonna do yet. I'm thinking of factory worker/office cleaner but I like the idea of the paper mill @molliemoogle . I'm just trying to figure out which one would be more likely to actually hire him cause he's a bit antisocial. Imagining him in a job interview is a bit of a laugh.
The more shit the job the less rigorous the interview. "Factory worker" is so generic that unless the job environment doesn't figure in your writing you'll need to be more specific. Also, factory work frequently involves teams, fellow workers or at the very least a supervisor...so human contact.
Hmm yeah I thought of that, I thought maybes his manager could be bringing him in for meetings about how he wasn't co-operating with his team, he could keep getting put on warnings and he'd think that it was so beneath him. I'm thinking maybes an office cleaner is looking more likely then. I'm not writing extensively about his job, and some human contact is ok, he's just not looking to make friends with anyone.
"Co-operating with his team" is a somewhat white-collar attitude...working in a factory is a different kind of team, you're more likely to be (e.g.)operating a press by yourself, but there'll be a row of presses and a group of operatives, who would all have some relationship with each other. Or a drop-forge. There'd be the forger (the guy who's holding the white-hot bar of steel - so he's a big lad because it's a physically demanding job to carry such a weight all day long), his mate (the guy who trips the hammer - responsible job because if he trips it at the wrong time he will - at least - damage the die when it catches something wrong. Or he could drop it on somebody's fingers.) and sometimes a clipper - a young lad who will "clip" the excess flash around the forged steel. That's a very close-knit team, where the guys probably drink together. Or a production line. Take chocolate Easter Eggs. Somebody gets out the chocolate egg, wraps it, down on the conveyor, put into the box (maybe a plastic moulding first), put two Chocolate bars into the box, seal up the box. The conveyor is going at a pace, you have only a few seconds to do your job before another egg is coming along to be dealt with. Typically there would be two or three people at each station, so you don't have to do every egg yourself, but if you're lagging, leaving an unfair amount of work to your co-workers you'll hear about it. Right down to hearing "get your coat, your last paycheque will be in the post." Office cleaner gives more opportunity for solitary work, in a quiet unpeopled environment.
Thanks @Shadowfax , that's really informative. I think office cleaner it is then. My MC's gonna hate me!
No, more like police wannabes. Some cops take second jobs as security. I work with mall security, one of my contractors. They are minimum wage jobs, a few of them want to be police. My uncle was a police officer. He used to work as security at rock concerts for extra pay on his off duty hours.
In order to be a night watchman or security guard, you have to do a training course and get an SIA license. That's for the UK, anyway. Usually, you just have to pay the money and it's a two-day course or something. Don't need police/military service... but obviously for competitive jobs it would help. It depends where your guy is working. There's also jobs like reception staff, phone operator, warehouse operator, fast food restaurant staff, 24-hour store clerk. Anywhere that's open at night really.
I used to work as a night auditor at a hotel. My hours were from 11 PM to 7 AM and there wasn't anyone else on staff during those hours. Just me by my lonesome. It's basically just sitting at the front desk. Duties include checking people in, checking people out, and some easy paper work (receipts) in the middle of the night. My hotel was full most of the time, yet I barely saw anyone during my shift. People are there to sleep after all. If you want him to have a really solitary job, make him a night auditor at a hotel/motel that's completely dead. He can sit around and watch tv the whole time or write his novel.
Even anti-social people get good jobs. I have a pretty good job. LOL! With a paper mill, you tend to work rostered nights/days (usually a set schedule per week). Your MC would have to be around people, but doesn't necessarily have to interact with them. But, it sounds like you like the idea of an office cleaner. It definitely is a "shit job"... sometimes, quite literally.
bit late to the party, but i work in retail, and supermarkets have people working overnight, i work 6pm to 10pm for a clothing retail store (i shan't name which one) and even though the store is open for the first 2 hours of my shift, its still pretty solitary, as everyone, including customers tends to ignore you because you have a trolley/cage by where you are working.
Thanks guys, you've been so helpful. The idea of a night auditor is pretty interesting. There's a bit more to his anti social-ness than just not liking people though. It's not even really that he doesn't like people (he used to be quite friendly) he just doesn't like the idea of someone getting close to him enough to find out his secret.
Before I moved I used to work 10 pm to 7:30 am at an extremely well known retailer. Even in a relatively small store (it was still technically a "supercenter" though it didn't have the floor space of many of the other nearby branches) in a small town there was a team of six of us who did nothing all night long except "bin" (organize and store) excess merchandise that wouldn't fit on the shelves and "pick" (locate, remove, and scan out of the computer system) merchandise that we were getting low on to go out to the floor and be stocked. It was tedious and often times hard work and even with six of us doing that and nothing else it was a struggle some nights, especially during busy seasons like Christmas or our yearly inventory, to get everything put away or take down everything the system said needed to go out. There was absolutely zero contact with the public. The only times I left the back room was during my lunch hour, to take stock out to the floor if the person covering the area was too swamped to come and get it, or in the very rare case I was needed to cover one of the departments or registers. The last reason was only because I had previous training in both stocking and register operating, so I was one of the few people on the back room team that management could shuffle around if someone called in sick or something. Even working with a team of 5 other people, and constantly having other people (managers, truck unloaders, stockers, department heads) working in the backroom too, there is very little contact with anyone at all. We would get our instructions for the night then all split up and go to different "bins" (storage areas) and work pretty much alone most of the night. The only real contact we had was during breaks, at the beginning of the night, and towards the end when those who were already done with their area went to help those who hadn't finished yet. Part of the reason I liked the job was because I prefer to work alone and as long as I got my tasks done I was generally left in peace all night.
I've worked nights as a security guard many times. I've worked alone in a corporate environment (imagine...a six floor office building all to yourself for 12 hours...) Plus I've also worked in teams where there can be a lot of camaraderie or deep one to one discussions on the meaning of life. Conducting patrols alone can be scary, even with the lights on. There's just something creepy about the fact that it's night time, especially if your mind starts to think about sinister things (I usually do my patrols listening to esoteric radio shows on YT about crazy topics like interdimensional beings entering earth using the LHC) My friend just finished doing a few months at place where he worked Monday-Fridays on nights only, and it was driving him crazy. He was losing human interaction. Thankfully I've got him working with me now.
I worked nights in the leisure industry and the poor guy in the kitchen would not see anyone for hours on end unless he'd done something wrong. One guy, in the bottom of the building, frying up stuff out of the freezer for drunks and then sending it up on a 'dumb waiter' to the servery. It was always boiling hot down there, so no one wanted to keep him company anyway, and it was really difficult to keep the position consistently filled by anyone but the most antisocial applicants!
