Working socks

The work that I travel for is often shift work, and sometimes, when I'm feeling nice & like the people I'm sharing the shifts with are people I want to be generous towards, I take the attitude that since I've come from a time zone 4 hours earlier, it's easier for me to take shifts that are crappy (like midnight to 8 AM) than it is for the locals. On the other hand, sometimes I take the attitude that I've done my share of those crappy shifts and some young thing with something to prove (possibly involving machismo) should take a turn.

Anyway, I took my turn to do the night shift and I used some of it to knit. The work is periodic and, for the most part, a matter of being watchful, rather than active. It's ideal for knitting. Better yet, the particular place I was working on this occasion has at least on other knitter. It's nice to know, at 3 AM, that there might be someone else knitting in the building.

I finished sock one on the night shift. I even grafted the toe up, without the use of a tapestry needle. I hadn't brought one, and it wasn't necessary. I started the next sock almost immediately. I did stop after I'd got to the end of the cuff. But that is one heck of a productive night.

I have a colleague who brings knitting or crocheting to every meeting she attends. That way, she says, the meeting is guaranteed to be productive. I wish I had the nerve to do that. I wish I could concentrate on the meeting as well as the knitting, but I know I can't and I know that the knitting would win. And I'd lose my job. And rightly so.

Instead, I will occasionally knit in caught moments between monitoring things on the night shift and celebrate a done sock in the darkest hours before dawn.