You know things are slow at work when a coworker falls sleep while watching a YouTube video. Granted, the snoozing is probably not due to boredom. Rather it’s likely insufficient sleep. Sure we tend to yawn when we’re bored, but then we’d go find something to un-bore ourselves. Nobody goes, “You know what, I am bored. Let me go take a nap!”
Indeed, the workday does go by quicker when there is more stuff to do. This workload ebb and flow comes with the territory of one, working at a university, and two, being on the service side. People call us when shit goes bad, so if we’re busy all the time, then something is horribly wrong. We are smack dab in the middle of the Fall semester, so not a lot of things are going wrong at the moment (knock on wood).
The weather in San Francisco has finally turned cooler, a real autumnal feeling. That coziness probably adds to the drowsiness factor (I definitely sleep better during the winter months). The coworker did just return from a heavy lunch, too, so all the pressures of wanting-to-take-a-nap were working against him staying awake. Sadly, a public university is not the Google campus: there aren’t any nap pods around here.
As a purveyor of consistent, quality sleep, you won’t find me doing the head-nod into slumber whilst doing a sedentary activity. I haven’t done something like that since my college days of falling asleep in class. For obvious reasons, my sleep schedule was all over the place back then. No, professor, your lecture isn’t boring! I’m simply running on fumes.
These days, I no longer sacrifice sleep to the altar of continue playing a video game, or keep watching a TV series. I purposely leave social gatherings early in order to preserve the amount of sleep I get. It is too important for brain health to forsake.
Just the tip.