stevenjohn

today was different.
i left the house at fifteen til five in the morning. the sky still was dark, then sun had not even shown a hint of rising. when i got to work i sat in my car and smoked cigarettes and watched the headlights file into the parking lot. skilled drivers made parking in reverse in a crowded lot look like a cakewalk; people who have parked in the same place for years tend to be experts. down the hill and a walk away building 400, like a sleeping giant in the still calm of predawn, spilled dim light through aged and dirtied windows but only enough to glow in the pitch black. flood lights and amber-glow street lamps illuminated outdoor workstations and cast an eerie glow across third avenue and the nichols industrial complex - an eerie glow with which i was, after a year and a half on the graveyard shift, intimately familiar - and it was strange to me to see it all from above on the hill. but such stillness was only a perception. the forklift traffic outside the building betrayed the buzzing activity inside.
building 400 does not sleep. while manhours, overtime, and even jobs are clipped away from the anniston army depot on a regular basis, building 400's denizens are given more and more overtime and more and more work to do. the rest of the depot may take at least a nap, but not 400.
i have seen both sides of its twenty-four hour day now. the dark, lamp-lit night with a few handfuls of employees (depot and contractor) working to accomplish as much as possible and now the furious ants that crawl all over the building during the day accomplishing maybe half of what night shift was able to do with so fewer people.
while i looked out over the quiet and relatively deserted depot this morning and smoked my cigarettes and listened to music i found myself missing my life on second shift.
today was different.