Fight the Urge

It's 3 a.m. on Monday and I am sitting in one of the world's largest financial institution's offices alone. I sit in a quiet conference room surrounded by televisions streaming Bloomberg News, CNBC, Fox Business Channel. There are white erase boards with grids outlining media opportunities, strategies and laptops scattered about the giant pinewood desk the sits in the middle of the room.

The office building itself spans the length of a New York Avenue (roughly 10 city blocks). It is stark like the inside of a dated hotel lobby. The cubicles are made of a pinewood that looks as though it was recently polished with Pledge. It is quiet and I sit alone. 

I am exhausted. It is the third day of this graveyard shift and my eyelids have never felt heavier. Except for that one time I stayed up for roughly 32 hours for Children's Miracle Network in college. I think that had to be worse because I was on my feet the entire time, but this certainly doesn't feel any better. I'm fighting the urge to just lay on the floor and close my eyes contently. The problem being that I wouldn't be doing my job...that can't happen. 

I don't have a remedy for staying awake. I've tried splashing cold water on my face, but that is only temporary relief. I've found myself chugging cups of water just to keep me occupied. I've become OCD with checking the news sources (as my job description entails) for any mention of said financial firm...there hasn't been a relevant news story in almost an hour. 

I try not to look at the clock, but it's hard when you're counting down the hours, minutes and seconds until you can just collapse on your bed, under the soft down comforter and finally rest peacefully. I jacked myself up on caffeine before starting my "shift" at 11 p.m. I felt my eyelids jittering back and forth for a bit when I tried closing my eyes for a 15 minute power nap. Needless to say, I didn't get to nap. 

I've paced the room a couple of times as I peer out the glass windows that make up 1/2 of the room and overlook Lexington Avenue. The occasional taxi will whiz by. I watched a homeless man make his bed for the night just beyond the scaffolding of a not-yet-constructed building. He made the bed so delicately on the concrete floor that I envied him for a split second at the thought of him actually getting to close his eyes. 

I thought about doing cart wheels down the empty hallways, but I refrained out of fear the periodical floor sweeping by the rent-a-cops would catch me in the act. Plus, I'm a 24-year-old man, not a 7-year-old girl with a skip it. 

I also thought about doing hand stands, but my head already feels a little light from the lack of sleep, slight hunger and over caffeination. Caffeination is underlined in red right now because the dictionary on my computer doesn't recognize it as a word. Lack of sleep causes you to make up words and evidently ramble on about your current induced insomniadic (another made up word apparently) state of mind. 

I dread the fact that this is merely my first weekend of doing this shift. I have to do it next weekend, but the weekend after that (which seems like light years away) I get a break. Maybe I will learn some tricks of the trade and the second time around it won't be so God awful. My eyes feel really dry right now.

The only thing that will legitimately get me through this is the fact that I booked a plane ticket to Florida for the first weekend in March. I could not be more ecstatic at the thought of a beach, flip flops and escaping Manhattan. 

I would love to run down the hall right now...sprint even, but it is just out of the question. My pants are too corporate. Yes, I am wearing pinstripe dress pants that I just referred to as corporate. Just look at this stream of conscious. This is what my thoughts have been reduced to at this hour. Short. Curt. Sentences... and Paid Programming on the plasma television. 

I just caught my reflection in the window. All it says to me is "You look dreadfully tired" in a British accent. I can't even do a good British accent...