Things We Blame the Night Shift For

The screen saver is changed

That's what we find the most--

I mean, what irritates us

The screensavers

Beaches--that's what we leave it on

Calm, serene beaches

Then we come back in the morning

And there's an old dog

With mange

Licking himself

Right on our computer screen

We blame the night shift for this

For this and the phones

Smelling like vinegar

This strong, acidic smell

That you can't get rid of

Except with the special wipes

That we keep in the supply closet

On the far side of the floor

We blame them for the stains on the carpet

Stains that we, the day shift, would never make

We are not a staining bunch

We find dust on our mouse pads

Spiderwebs strung along out cubicles

Filth everywhere

Everywhere

After a mere sixteen hours
Away from the office

We also sense a sort of...desperation

Loneliness

Malaise

Because the night shift

Is a shiftless shift

Full of winos

And degenerates

At least, that's what we imagine

We arrive in the morning

And cleaning supplies are strewn everywhere

Well, a mop is anyway

A mop is just strewn in the middle of the floor

Shamelessly strewn

And we scowl

And imagine that it was too much trouble

For the drug-using, porn-addicted

Wart-covered night shift

To deal with putting away a mop

We find popcorn kernels

Left underneath the ceiling tiles

Which we now have to check

Because the night shift is so extravagantly disgusting

We find empty paper cups with faces drawn on them

Crush almonds in the stapler

Peach pits in boxes of black pens
And Post-It notes with lewd sayings written on them
In Aramaic and Senegalese

It took us HOURS to figure out

What those languages were

We blame the night shift
For the smudges on our computer screens
The stale bagels in the break room fridge
The missing ready-lunches from the break room fridge
The sign on the break room fridge
Held up by dinosaur magnets
That says--

'The Day Shift Isn't Real'

What does that even mean?

Sometimes we swear we can see the ghosts of the night shift
Walking among us
As we do our work
During the day

The sunlight cuts through their ethereal forms
As they sit
And lounge
And whisk the day away
Like so much whipped cream

We move about and around these ghosts
Refusing to let them bother us

We keep up our productivity
Bouncing our numbers up
In the hopes that our boss will see
That there's really no point
In having a night shift at all

While we work
The floors are vacuumed
The stains are lifted
The phones ring
The lights flicker
They go out

And we plan to go home
We anticipate it
We look forward to it
But in the meantime we sit
Wondering how long it takes
For the night shift to show up

Wondering when they'll arrive
To take over the jobs
That belong
To us