Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Inflation's a bitch. I'm reminded of that every time I go shopping for... well, anything. Anything except a computer or big-screen TV, that is. Those have come way down in price even as their capabilities grow. But pretty much everything else in life? Yeah, way more expensive. I was especially reminded of that today when I was shopping for groceries.

Yes, groceries. One of the basic necessities. Not luxury goods like brand-name hand-bags, not discretionary items like Starbucks Caramel Machiatto Frappuccino, but actual grocery purchases down to basic meat and potatoes (and vegetables, thankyouverymuch).



Compared to right around the start of Covid, so roughly 6 years ago day, prices on items up and down the aisles at the supermarket today are 50%, 100%, or more higher than before.

For example, one of the items I bought today was a 12-pack of soda. Its regular shelf price is now $13. I clearly remember it being $5 six years ago. That's a 160% increase. Yeah, soda isn't a staple at the same level that fresh produce, or meat, or bread is. But all those have gone up, too. And not just by a little bit— because I know inflation is real and is an unavoidable part living in a capitalist world— but by leaps and bounds. And, more saliently, by leaps and bounds more than the government's official rates of inflation.

What's the official rate of inflation? It's varied over the past 6 years from a low near zero to the high single digits. Overall, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) inflation calculator, the consumer price index (CPI) today is 26% higher than in March, 2020.

The overall CPI is up 26%. Yet basic groceries are up 50%, 100%, or more. And it's not just groceries that have shot up way faster than government official numbers. Anyone who pays for their own insurance has seen that increase an average of 10% a year over the last several years. With insurance it's not always a level !0% a year; sometimes it's a whopping 25% or 50% increase all at once, followed by a flat rate the next year. The point is, the difference between reality and government numbers is stark.

Groceries and insurance are just two major household expense items I could name. There are plenty of others that are also going up in cost, way faster than the government CPI. It makes me wonder what the hell else are they measuring? The cost of a Cray 2 (1985) supercomputer? Because computing has come waaaay down in price. You can buy a value-pak of 5,000 Cray 2s today for $800... and don't worry about where you'd put it; it all fits in your pocket! (Hint: it's your smartphone.)

The final note I'll close with is an introspection about whether complaining about inflation/"prices these days" is an old-person thing. I do often feel like I'm become a cranky old codget every time I hesitate to buy something because I remember when it was so much cheaper. But it's actually not just an old-person thing because the rise in prices has been so abrupt. The other day my sister told me that my niece, my 19-year-old niece, complains about "prices these days". She's just 19 and she remembers when everything was noticeably less expensive. ...Because it's only six years ago!

I remarked yesterday that following the start of my retirement I am cleaning out old work-related stuff— both out of my mind as well as out of my shelves. Yesterday I removed a bunch of work stuff from my mobile phone so that it would no longer live rent-free in my head. Today I tackled a bunch of the books I've had on a shelf near my desk and in piles atop my desk and at my nightstand.

I decided I would largely banish those books to "purgatory", the nickname we use for our finished crawlspace. But to do that I first had to make space in purgatory for them. I did that by moving a useful multipurpose shelf we bought when our pantry was out of commission down to purgatory.



I started by moving really old books onto the shelf. These books (above) were in two boxes stacked on the floor. By shelving the books I'd make better use of vertical space and thus free up floor space— for a second shelf to hold the books coming down from my office!

As I looked at these books, though, I realized I will pretty much never use them again. Ever. Seriously, I sat there for 10 minutes in the crawlspace, just staring at them, weighing what to do next.

I've remarked before I can't bring myself to throw out books. So I decided I would donate them to my local library. Among other reasons why, these technical books were $50-65 in the 1990s. To the extent the material in them is still relevant— and a lot of it is basically applied mathematics, so it is— their newer counterparts probably sell for $150-$200 new today. Each. Times the 25-30 books pictured. I'm not looking to get money for them; but by giving them to the library I hope they help students today who struggle to afford that kind of expense.

So. I hauled those books off to the library today. That freed up my shelf-space. Then I hauled these down from my home office and bedroom nightstand:



Okay, the bottom shelf here were already in the crawlspace. Those are mostly proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH. I decided to hold onto those for the time being in case they have collector value. If nothing else they have sentimental value to me, as that field was my focus of study from my last few semesters of undergrad through 3 years of graduate school through the first 6 years of my post-academic career.

The middle and top shelves are the books I moved downstairs. As you scan the titles I think you can see why they're drastically less relevant in retirement. Oh, and I mentioned above not thinking books should ever be thrown out.... Well, there's one on the shelf I'd make an exception for. See if you can guess.

I've been writing about a D&D adventure I created and DMed recently, The Collector's Menagerie. I shared in my last blog that a player noted the names/types of rooms in the mansion setting— The Hall, The Library, The Conservatory— and remarked, "This is like a game of Clue!" And how I quipped, "With monsters lurking in the rooms waiting to kill you, it's like Cursed Clue!"



You might wonder, given the setting in a dead guy's mansion and the (twisted) murder mystery element to the story if I conceived this adventure as, "It's like Clue, but things in every room are trying to kill you." Frankly it would be awesome if that's how I came up with it. Alas, I did not. Not this time.

I have, in the past, created memorable adventures that started with the simple idea, "What if X, but also Y?" Or to be more specific, "What if something culturally familiar to us players in the modern day were the setting of a swords-and-sorcery fantasy story?" and fill it with in-jokes to see how soon the players figure it out. My greatest hits in that vein have been "The heroes traverse a magical Gate to a Renaissance Faire circa 1995 (pre-cell phones) but think it's actual early Renaissance" and "All the traps in the lich's lair form the lyrics to The Eagles' Hotel California." 😆🤣🤘

Yeah, it could have been epic if I started with "Cursed Clue". But I think it is kind of epic even though I only kind of backed in to the story being Cursed Clue.

My kernel of an idea for this adventure was simply, "Monsters are in a city mansion". I used AI to flesh out the idea. That got me to the point of it being a variety of exotic monsters (read: magical beasts and aberrations) that had escaped their cages after the owner of the house, a reclusive collector, died recently.

For the mansion itself I already had a map of an actual English city mansion I'd used as a setting in a previous game. I grabbed that to use again here. The names of the rooms on the map reminded me of a mansion map I know well from my childhood....



Yes, Clue! And it was because of the maps that I made the connection. The real-life mansion floor plan had rooms marked Hall, Ballroom, Conservatory, Drawing Room, etc. Those reminded me of the rooms in Clue. BTW, the Drawing Room is the Lounge. The terms are basically interchangeable in historic wealthy Western homes, indicating room a full of lavish but comfortable furniture for withdrawing to after a meal to impress guests.

Once I made the connection myself I thought about how to lean into the idea of "This is Cursed Clue". I tried to think of a way to stash treasure items, some analogue of the candlestick, rope, knife, etc., in various rooms that the heroes would need to recover to complete the challenge. Ultimately I punted that because it seemed too complex. Simplicity was one of the things I was after with this adventure idea. But I did put in some ridiculous secret doors connecting rooms on opposite sides of the map. Shh, the players haven't found those yet!

Three months ago I started telling the story of the church up the hill. Except for most of my life it was the mystery of the church up the hill.



I grew up in a Catholic family, and we lived in a neighborhood where there was a Catholic church right up the hill from us. It was easy walking distance, about 3 blocks. But we almost never attended that church, at least not that I remember. Instead we were regular parishioners at the Catholic church in the next town over— a church a 20 minute car trip away, in a town we never lived in.

It always seemed strange to me, "Why don't we attend the church almost literally in our back yard—" the strip of land immediately behind our back yard was literally owned by the church— "Instead of driving to another city?" I asked my parents many times. The answers they gave never made sense. It wasn't until I was in my 40s, and my father was on his deathbed, that I pieced together the truth to unravel this mystery.

Follow me through the jump for the rest of the story.

( Read the rest of the story... )

I wrote the other day that a coworker sent me a Christmas gift of a bottle of whiskey... that turns out to be a $200 bottle. Seeing the price gave me pause because I don't buy liquor that expensive for myself. Okay, I have split bottles of wine in restaurants that have run well past $200, but that's with restaurant markup. I figure the price at a good discount liquor store like Total Wine would be anywhere from 1/3 to as little as 1/5 of that. And it's at Total Wine that that bottle of whiskey goes for $209.99. At BevMo it's $226.

The price of the gift wasn't the only shocker I saw when I looked up details on it. My search for "Yamazaki whiskey" (Yamazaki is the producer) turned up the deets on this old friend:

Yamazaki 12 year single malt is a Japanese whiskey I discovered umpteen years ago when I started traveling to Japan and was first exploring whiskey. I say discovered because back then, in the late 00s, Japanese whiskey was not common in the US. The first few bottles I bought— including one that was a gift for a colleague who'd helped me from Sunnyvale on a project, staying up late working until midnight a few nights to sync time zones with me in Tokyo— I bought in Ginza and hand-carried home on my NRT-SFO flight.

I was a few years ahead of the curve on Japanese whiskeys. The first bottles I brought home were novel even to my few friends who were whiskey fans. One had dozens of bottles of whiskey on his shelf at home, and this was new to him.

Within a few years Japanese whiskey got popular in the US. I was able to buy Yamazaki 12 at places like BevMo. The price was still reasonable, at first... $35, about the same as I paid at a liquor store Tokyo, adjusting for exchange rate.

But then Japanese whiskeys got stupid popular in the US. Actually, all whiskey got popular. In the early/mid '10s in the US whiskey had become the "it" drink. And Japanese whiskey became what the self-styled whiskey sophisticates drank to show the whiskey mass-market drinkers how they were more sophisticated because they'd already gone beyond the traditional Scotch and Irish whiskeys everyone else was celebrating. Soon the mass market drinkers wanted in on Japanese whiskey, too. The result was the comparatively small Japanese production houses sold out so much of their liquor that age-statement whiskeys like Yamazaki 12 became extremely rare.

Long story short: The Yamazaki 12 year is now a $200 bottle, too!

I wish I'd bought a few more bottles when they were $35. Alas I only have the one, and there are only maybe two shots left in it. I'll have to drink them with intention.

Once I saw how much the price of Yamazaki 12 year had inflated I was curious about another, even more expensive Japanese whiskey I also picked up umpteen years ago.



This Hibiki 17 year was about $85 when I bought it in Japan in 2010. That was the most expensive bottle I'd bought up to that point. Adjusting for inflation it'd be $125 today, which is still more than I've paid for any bottle. But inflation is not the only story here.

As with the Yamazaki 12, Suntory sold so much Hibiki when it was stupid-popular that they sold out most of their back-stock. Hibiki 17 has been discontinued. Bottles now sell for $800+. 😳

"Where's the beef?" actress Clara Peller famously barked in a series of Wendy's TV commercials back in the 1980s. The commercials were such a success that the line became part of the cultural lexicon for years after. Kids would repeat it to each other and laugh, sort of like kids today do with "6-7", except that "Where's the beef?" had an actual, clear source— one that adults could understand, too. Well, I've been repeating the phrase again this past week, though with a bittersweet chuckle this time. The Wendy's restaurants in Sunnyvale are now gone!

It was in the news a few weeks ago that Wendy's is closing approximately 300 underperforming restaurants across the US. This comes after closing about 150 restaurants in 2024. (Example news coverage: CBS News article, 17 Nov 2025)

The last remaining Wendy's in Sunnyvale seems to have been part of this wave. The restaurant shut down sometime in the past week or two, I think. It's a few miles away and in a part of town I rarely traverse.

For a long time we had a Wendy's restaurant closer to home, just 1 mile away, on a street I regularly drive. In fact it used to be just around the corner from a spot where I worked for a few years!

That shop closed up during Covid, presumably a casualty of reduced business. The property changed hands, and they bulldozed the restaurant and put a bright, new Taco Bell in its spot. I've eat there once since then, just to remind myself Yeah, Taco Bell is kind of gross. 🤣

So anyway, now when I'm in the mood for a Dave's Old-Fashioned, I've got to travel miles to get one. A quick check on Google Maps shows there are four Wendy's still standing in San Jose, a couple in Fremont, and one up in Redwood City.

I'm not going to go that far for a Dave's Old-Fashioned, though. The main reason is they're just not that good anymore.

Oh, I used to love me a ¼-pound single combo years ago. Back in college, for example, a new Wendy's opened on a busy corner near where I lived the last 3 semesters there. It was right on my walk to/from classes. I ate there easily a few times a week. And it was good. Other Wendy's since then just haven't been as good. Even when that other Wendy's in Sunnyvale was right around the corner from my office, I ate there maybe once a month at most. And the one that just closed? I ate there back in March and was disappointed. The food was expensive, employees blocked off the cash register with a self-ordering kiosk, then they made my food wrong, and they barely cared.

Sometimes there's a reason businesses fail. I mean, there's always a reason, but a lot of the time it's not the macro trends that business owners routinely cite— things like the economy, Covid-19, inflation, minimum wage being raised, the skyrocketing divorce rate, or my favorite stupid excuse, "Millennials Are Killing the XYZ Industry". Sometimes, probably much of the time, the call is coming from inside the house!

Oh, you might still be wondering about that Where's the Beef? meme I mentioned at the start. Here's the infamous Wendy's TV commercial from 1984:



Enjoy!

Thanksgiving triplog #8
Manassas, VA · Mon, 24 Nov 2025. 3:30pm.

We're back at the hotel now, between episodes of eating our way through friends and family. Earlier today we met old friends for lunch in Arlington; this evening we'll meet one of my cousins and his wife for dinner in South Riding. South Riding is a place-name I never knew existed, and I grew up not far from here! But more on that later.

My sister said something yesterday that bothers me. It's about her kids. During our pleasant day together full of verbal repartee I teased her gently about how difficult it was for us to buy graduation gifts for her older two kids.

One of them we'd asked several times what he wanted for a graduation gift without getting a response. We could've just bought him something but didn't want to risk (a) duplicating a gift from someone else or (b) buying him something expensive he didn't actually like or want. And (c) we didn't want to give a gift as impersonal as "Here's a wad of cash".

Ultimately, 9 months later, he responded to us and asked for a new phone. It was clear from his asking that his mother had put him up to it. That's what I was teasing C. about— "When P. asked us for that phone, it's because he complained to you that his phone broke and you told him to soak his rich uncle and aunt for a new one, right?"

This wasn't just teasing C. about her kids, though. The topic of graduation gfits is topical because one of P's younger brothers, J., will be graduating in 6-7 months. And given how long it took to get an answer from P., we figured we'd better start asking J. now. Including asking his mom what he needs. 🤨

"My kids are reluctant to ask for things," she explained. She hypothesized that it comes from when the family was struggling harder and material goods were in short supply. Oh, the kids always had a roof over their head, and adequate food, and two pairs of shoes without holes, she assured me. But they learned the answer to "Can we have?" other things was No. So the kids stopped asking.

I recognize part of the dynamic. I was raised in similar conditions. Money was tight, and while we always had a roof over our heads— though at least once my parents came close to not being able to pay the mortgage—and food on the table, other things were luxuries. Including shoes. While C is happy her kids always had two good pairs of shoes, one sneakers and one dress-up for going to church, I usually only had one pair. And half the time they had holes.

Where it gets worse (sadder) with C's kids, though, is that they've internalized guilt over wanting better things. While I never accepted that holey sneakers are all I deserved in life, or that it was wrong to want sneakers without holes, that's what C's kids are seeming to do. She gave the example of how one of them said he didn't want braces because they'd be too expensive for Mom and Dad to afford. It's great that young kids are learning about making tradeoffs in life, but accepting crooked teeth because you think braces— like every other kid in school gets— is too much to ask for is sad.

Again, I recognize part of the dynamic here. I recognize it because I lived it. And because I lived it I'm pretty sure those kids came up with this internalized guilt all on their own.

My father tried to instill guilt in me by telling me I was greedy. I was greedy for wanting nice gifts for my birthday. I was greedy for wanting a second pair of shoes— without holes. I was greedy for wanting a bigger slice of pizza at dinner. I was greedy even for asking that we get pizza when Dad asked the family, "Where should we go out for dinner tonight?" The proper thing to do, according to my dad, would've been to keep quiet until everyone else stated an opinion, and only then ask for what I want.

The difference was, that bullshit guilt trip only half worked on me. I mean, I never did stop believing I should ask for what I want. I did internalize some guilt around it, though. Even into my 40s there were times I felt bad about saying, "I would like XYZ for dinner" because I feared— through internalized guilt— that expressing my want was wrong because other people want things, too, and somehow when multiple people want things my wants are wrong. 🙄

Well, we didn't come to an answer for what J. might like for his graduation next year.

Or maybe it'll be paying his parents back for his braces. 🙁

It's time for another chapter in the story mystery of the church up the hill. This is now part 3 of the story. Originally I had thought I'd be able to fit it all in one journal entry but as I started writing the story it grew. It grew first from one blog to three. Then as I took a slight detour into writing about AI and photography in part 2 I realized the story will take 4, maybe 5, chapters to complete.

As I noted in the previous chapter, my dad lost his job when I was a little kid. The retail chain he worked for went out of business.



Dad's job wasn't a great job. The hours were brutal. As a store manager he was salaried, not hourly, so he didn't get paid for his extra work. And extra work was required every time a store employee called in sick and no substitute could be found, and every time there was a break-in afterhours and the alarm company and the police called. The way my mom told the story, years later, break-in attempts happened regularly, like at least once a month. The store was in a rough neighborhood.

Dad's job wasn't a great job, but at least it paid the bills. I think. Then he lost the job, with little or warning.

This was the mid 1970s. As I noted in the previous chapter, the economy sucked. Technically the US had just pulled out of its worst recession since the Great Depression, but hiring had not yet resumed. I imagine younger folks today who lived through the jobless recovery of the Great Recession in the late 00s understand the pattern.

Speaking of younger generations and modern patterns, my parents in the mid 1970s did something that's familiar to a younger generation today: they hustled. With "real" jobs not really hiring, my parents both took on whatever odd jobs they could find. Between hustling and scrimping and borrowing, they kept a roof over our heads and food on the table.



This is where some of my earliest memories meld in with the stories my parents later told. Oddly I don't remember my parents being stressed around that time, or unhappy. Probably that's because I was too young to recognize such emotions. It could also be that my parents hid their stress and worries well from us younger kids. One snapshot memory I do have from back then is my parents giving each other a high five when my mom said, "We did it! We paid the mortgage this month."

I also have early memories of some of the jobs my parents did during that time of hustling. My mom started selling Tupperware. Many of my earliest memories are of riding with her in the car as she drove back and forth to the Tupperware warehouse. We'd return with a suitcase full of products she'd sell via Tupperware parties.



I wish I could say that Tupperware was how my parents pulled out of the economic nosedive after my dad lost his job. I wish I could say that Tupperware was how my mom built  a lasting and fulfilling career as an entrepreneur— which was part of the Women's Liberation pitch Tupperware was making back in the 1970s. Alas, I'm not sure my mom ever made any money with Tupperware.

That's because Tupperware was, for many years, a multi-level marketing (MLM) organization. In MLMs most distributors make very little money. See Wikipedia's Tupperware page, for example.

Mom stopped selling Tupperware after a short period of time. Likely that's because she netted little or no money after a lot of work— work planning and presenting at Tupperware parties, hustling to get people to place orders (remember, in a tough economy), then having to pick up & deliver the orders once they were shipped to the local warehouse. But while the dream of making it a sustainable career disappeared quickly, the Tupperware itself did not. Mom bought a number of pieces herself, because they were useful. And they lasted. The bright, 1970s vintage colors and those fluted lids were a mainstay in our house for many years after.

To be continued....

I grew up in a neighborhood where there was a church up the hill. It wasn't right next to our house but it was a short walk away. Go up to the corner, turn left, go to the end of the cul-de-sac, then follow the walkway behind one of the houses up to the church lot. It was close enough that by the time I was 8, my younger sister and I could ride our bicycles up there. ...But not on Sundays. For even though it was a church of our religion, the religion my father had been born into and almost dedicated his life to the priesthood of, we almost never attended that church. Instead my parents took us to another church of the same faith a 20 minute car ride away.



Why didn't we attend our own neighborhood church? It was so close a child could handle the walk. Indeed, I remember occasionally seeing some of our neighbors walking to or from late Sunday morning services when the weather was nice. But we virtually never joined them. Instead we piled into the family car and drove to another church virtually nobody in our town had heard of.

This church nestled among the mature trees in our neighborhood was unusual in our town. In our town, built almost entirely by a single developer starting in the mid 1960s, all the other churches were on the main roads into/out of town. That made them easy to drive to; they were on major roads with high speed limits. But there was no weekly parade of neighborhood faithful walking to or from services, because those churches were on high-speed roads with no sidewalks— next to the strip malls. "Centrally located!" I'm sure the 1960s suburban planners touted. But their design also made them centrally isolated. Except our neighborhood's church.

"Why don't we go to the church up the hill?" I asked my parents numerous times when I was a child.

"Urrrarrughh," was my father's reply— when he'd reply at all. It was a guttural grumble, a nonverbal answering indicating that the conversation was over.

A few times my mother answered. "Your father doesn't like the way they celebrate there," she explained. "It's too modern."

"What's different— or wrong— with the way they celebrate mass?" I wondered, sometimes out loud. But usually silently, because there was low tolerance for badgering questions when I was a little kid. Keep asking after a nonverbal Urrrarrughh answer and the next answer might be a nonverbal swat with his right hand.

Now, since we did occasionally attend a service at that church, occasionally as in once every year or two, I did see how they're different. Or, rather, how they're not.

They were both Catholic churches. There's a not a huge amount of difference in how they celebrate Sunday services. The Catholic church's strong central hierarchy sees to that. When we were on vacations hundreds of miles away we could drop in to a church, and the service would be immediately familiar. Oh, the physical building might look newer or older, there might be old-fashioned wooden pews and maybe even a pipe organ; but the content of the worship was word-for-word virtually the same. The same format, the same readings, the same prayers at the same times. So what was so unacceptably different about the church up the hill?



It's too modern. That three word phrase was the only meaningful answer I heard for a dozen or more years. And yet it was also absurdly meaning-less as there was so little different between the two churches. The only nominally "modern" thing I could spot in the church we avoided is that it had a younger core of volunteer musicians who led the congregation in songs. And among the instruments they played was... gasp!... an acoustic guitar.

Nobody else played an acoustic guitar in a Catholic church. Nobody. Especially not at the totally-not-modern church my father preferred. There they played only the one instrument that was common in the time of Jesus Himself. The electric organ.

Haha, yes, I'm being tongue-in-cheek with that. But seriously, the choices of instruments was the only material difference I could spot. And as far as differences go, it was pretty darn close to immaterial. The "modern" church sang the same songs with same appropriate reverence.

Years later, decades later, I learned the truth about why my father refused to take us to the "modern" church. As you might suspect when the stated reason is so vacuous, so readily disproven by easily observed fact, the real reason is quite different from the stated one. And often the real reason is shameful for the person offering the dissembling answer to admit— which is why they dissemble and distract instead. The real reason we didn't attend the church up the hill is my father felt shame going there.


To be continued....

Buzzfeed had a listicle in my newsfeed this evening, "People Who Work Night Shifts Are Sharing Things "Day Shifters" Don't Understand About Their World, And As A Day Shifter, I'm Intrigued". I'm a sucker for Buzzfeed listicles (lists of pithy responses in Reddit threads that are turned into articles) and I worked second shift for three summers years ago, so I figured, Hey, I'll play! Here are Five Things of mine:

1) Second Shift requires some adaptation. The second, or "swing", shifts I worked were 5pm-midnight, 5-11pm, or 4pm-midnight. The exact hours varied by job and year to year within one of the jobs (the company changed its hours). Working second shift puts you out of sync with the rest of society, though not as badly as third shift. That's because I could still manage daytime hours for appointments, shopping, etc... though it did take more careful planning and some adaptation. For example, if I wanted to go out for "dinner" at a restaurant, it was at 3:30pm before work. My effective dinner, after getting off work, was almost always some cooked straight out of the freezer at home at 1-2am. Virtually nothing was open after midnight, nor even really after 10pm, in the places I lived.

2) Second shift can be busy... or quiet. In one job I worked, a call center, the whole department was staffed during second shift, meaning there were a few dozen employees plus 2-3 managers. Second shift there entailed constant, steady work. Though the rest of the company was dark at those hours... so breaks in the lunch room or outside the front door were alwasy eerily quiet. At the other job I worked I was there as part of a 24x7 rotation in case something went wrong. And since I was the only person there for most of my shift, either it was something basic I could diagnose and repair on my own, or I documented and left it for the fully staffed M-F 8-5 crew.

3) You can't come home and go straight to bed. One of the biggest things people misunderstand about working second shift is thinking, "Oh, it's just 'til 11 or 12, that's like a slightly late evening." NO IT'S NOT! It's not "just like a slightly late evening" because when you get off shift and arrive home at midnight or almost 1am, you can't just go straight to bed. You're up. You've been working. You need a few hours to wind down before you can sleep! I was routinely going to bed at 3 in the morning. Sometimes, if I got involved in reading a book after work, I'd be up until 6am.

4) Switching shifts is hard. The third year I worked second shifts, I did that 3-4 nights a week and also had 1-2 days of first shift on the weekends. Switching 1st to 2nd wasn't hard, but going from 2nd to 1st always messed up my schedule. I'm glad I was young when I did that.

5) I was warned off working third shifts. Not that I ever considered shift work after summer jobs in college, but one of the third-shifters at the 24x7 place I worked was a quiet warning. There were two guys who worked the 11pm-9am shift, Ross and Gene. Ross had only been doing it for a year or two; he was hard up in a slow economy, and the work paid well. But Gene had always been working third shift. He looked to be 60... but one night during our shift overlap he and I were discussing his plan to go back to college to finish his degree, and I learned he was only 40. The man clearly looked 60! Everyone around the office whispered, "Yeah, you age fast working third shift!"