1. I was a teenager, and my sister’s violin camp overlapped with one of my cases of walking pneumonia. I had been assigned to watch the accessories shop table while Cait’s mom was away. I had to take my codeine cough medication at the noon lunch break. My mom covered the table while I took an extremely involuntary nap on the floor.
2. A survey call center, outbound automatic dialer. I was also taking college classes and watching my housemate’s small child. On slow jobs with not many pickups, I would find myself nodding off. Mostly this happened without incident, and I was always responsive to the calls that I did get when I was randomly QA monitored. Except for the one time I came to awareness having just said “No, sir, the fleas on the cat in your doghouse do not count as children between the ages of 11 to 17” — and couldn’t tell if it was something I’d dreamed saying, something that made sense in the context of what a respondent had said to me, or (worst of all) something I’d actually said to another human being with no reason except that I was half-dreaming… I walked home sick.
3. Same call center. I woke up for my 8 am Saturday shift around 11 with a fantastic headache … at work, presumably working the whole time, according to the notes in my own handwriting. I hadn’t been drinking but I imagine this is what a hangover must have felt like.
4. Night shift, written tech support. It was too hot to sleep well during the day, even though my shift would have normally been congenial. I would go on my break, set an alarm, and faceplant in the very quiet break room for some closed-eyes time if not an actual nap. It was common amongst the night shift, and not a problem unless you were late coming back from break because of it.
The next few are all from the same moderately-cushy Silicon Valley job where I was a relatively low-paid Wonder Admin to a large team of user experience folks. I was on a flexible schedule and allowed to set my own hours outside of a few mandatory coverage situations.
5. Hot meeting room, mid-afternoon, weekly team all-hands; there were about 30 of us crammed into a room that had a table big enough for maybe 15, and most of the hour wasn’t relevant to me. I would nod off and jerk awake. Nobody called me on it. After I got a different health issue dealt with, the involuntary naps stopped.
6. Once a month, I had an 8 am customer-facing meeting where I had to be on site, coherent, and ready to take notes. My commute was 35-45 minutes if I went early, an hour plus if I went late, and it helped if I was there by 7. So I would load my bags the night before, knock myself out with benadryl and melatonin, get up at my alarm, and show up early and disgustingly cheerful. (I shared my caffeine with the rest of the team, so they didn’t resent my early-morning cheer all that much.) Mid-afternoon, when the chocolate covered espresso beans wore off, I would clock out for a break, go down to the Wellness Room, and take a nap so I’d be safe to drive home. It was a quiet converted meeting room in a quiet corner of one of the buildings, and had a beanbag chair, some prayer rugs, and a couch. I’d fall over on the couch, pull up some white noise on my phone close to my ear, and use my cardigan as a combination blanket and eye mask. Once someone came in for prayers while I was waking up, so I stayed respectfully quiet and with my eyes covered while they finished. Another time, after my team moved, someone was surprised to see me in that building, but it was a small quad and my building’s wellness room didn’t have a couch.
7. Another 8 am meeting, and I woke up at the exact time where it would be too late to get any more sleep, but I was still arriving at work disgustingly early. The morning beams of sun were just starting to glint off my disco ball as I badged the door open. I had a guest “couch” in my cube (2 seats of an Ikea outdoor modular lounge seat) so I laid down on that, propped my feet on my desk chair, and snoozed until it was time to start meeting preparations. The early bird amongst my team managers was startled to see me there at that hour.
8. Low-echelon temp in Facilities, helping out with a corporate move on top of my receptionist duties. It was in Seattle, where I didn’t live, so I had shoehorned myself into a sleep schedule that allowed me to arrive on time, and relied on public transit to get me there and back safely. I warned my supervisor that I couldn’t stay too late because of how far out I lived, and that I would start to fade rapidly after about 7 pm. They were not quite prepared for me, around 7:15, to start acting literally drunk with tiredness, but I did get a lot of cube labels completed before that point.
9. I was still more popular and productive there than my predecessor, who had repeatedly been discovered napping under the reception desk. She had waited out her temp period and was securely hired before she started napping on the job. They moved her to a building where she would be busier and under better supervision, and I got the slow building.
Bonus: Before my partner was diagnosed with sleep apnea or ADHD, they knew that warm meeting rooms after lunch were their nemesis, and they chose to stand through a particular presentation instead of sit and possibly fall asleep. They were in their probationary period. One of the branch managers chose to interpret standing and fidgeting quietly as deliberate rudeness and inattentiveness. I still think they should be able to get that disciplinary action struck from their record based on the medical documentation of their diagnoses.