Night shift and the twilight zone

While most South Africans sleep, night shift drivers battle exhaustion, noise, loneliness and disrupted family life to keep the country moving. JIM WARD says that this is a world few people see or fully understand.

Drivers are not machines. They are human beings; flesh and blood like everyone else. You cannot switch them on and off like a light. When you run 24-hour operations, you soon realise people need time to adjust from night shift back to day shift. It is something easily overlooked under pressure from clients to reduce costs and maximise vehicle productivity.

The witching hour

During night shift, the first part of the night, from 6pm to around midnight, goes well. But then traffic dies down, the roads grow cold and empty and around 3am your body starts telling you it is time to sleep. This is the twilight zone, when energy levels are low.

This is when you need ops controllers who can pour energy into their calls and keep their drivers alert – staff who know their people well and can crack a joke to keep a tired driver chatting and engaged just when they are starting to sink. It is a rare gift.

For night shift workers, everything is reversed. They need to head home when all the taxis are heading into town. Taxis refuse to leave until the van is full, so shift drivers often wait, at their most tired, because a taxi owner will not leave until those last few seats are taken. If they fall asleep at the ranks, they are sometimes robbed.

When they eventually get home, their kids are gone. Home life gets disrupted; parents do not see their children returning from school because living timetables are inverted. If they arrive home early, the house is a hive of activity – breakfast preparations, uniforms, school bags and homework all clamouring just when they are trying to sleep.

When the kids get back, the driver has already left for work; their supper was his or her breakfast. Big events bypass them, so when one partner tells the other that they suspect their teenage daughter has become sexually active, it might be the last thing they want to hear before leaving for work.

The body needs time

When a driver has been working from 6pm to 5am for several weeks, they do not easily revert to day shift. The body, we found, needs three days (not two) to adjust. It is tough at home when one parent works nights. Simple things become issues.

As noted above, heading to work when everyone else is going home can mean long, solitary delays at unsafe taxi ranks unless drivers have private transport. We found it was worth collecting them from home and driving them back safely after shift. Yes, it was costly, but accidents and absenteeism cost more. Rested drivers are worth more than the cost of transport.

Daytime sleeping

Then there is the reality of daytime sleeping… What sleep? Drivers seldom enjoy the luxury of a peaceful home on a quiet suburban road, surrounded by a restful garden. No – they are probably trying to sleep in a baking-hot RDP house with a zinc roof and a bedroom window a few metres from the pavement, with daylight pouring through the Mr Price blinds.

Gladys Matsenjwa plays deafening choral music from 9.05am every day, wailing her chores away in forte soprano. The other neighbour, Ignatius Makhubela, loves lengthy sermons in xiTsonga, his preacher shouting into the microphone so close that his hoarse voice is distorted. High-octane religious fervour, bellowing about the eternal flames of hell and angelic hordes descending on Chiawelo.

Taxis roar by on their daily routes, backfiring and blowing their horns, sound systems loud enough for the bass to make windows reverberate – just how the conductors like it. Dogs bark, scrap and yelp, goats bawl and cockerels crow, while the neighbour in the scrapyard behind, Armando, the pencil-biter from Maputo, begins using his angle grinder on sheet metal, straightening the bonnet of a crashed Yaris with a hammer while Radio Mozambique plays kwasa*.

All the while, passers-by shout, laugh and whistle, and flirting schoolgirls shriek as only they can. Restful, it is not. The driver tosses and turns in the heat, worrying about his Ackermans account, and finally takes some Chinese muti from the spaza shop that makes him sleep but leaves him groggy and disorientated when he wakes up. He needs two cheap energy drinks before climbing into the cab and doing his pre-trip. His blood pressure goes berserk and his night vision is affected.

Switching back

After four weeks of this, the roster changes and he knocks off one Saturday morning only to be told as he leaves that he must report for duty on Monday morning: he is back on day shift. That is 46 hours away.

He sleeps during Saturday, but Amakhosi are playing – Chiefs vs Pirates. At the chisanyama* they are braaiing and drinking, noisily cheering every goal. He does not sleep much at night because he slept during the day. He watches TV, scrolls through nonsense on his phone, then becomes drowsy at about 3am, just when he was entering the final part of his shift the previous night. Having learnt to stay awake, now he must relearn how to sleep.

As dawn breaks, he decides to have a few drinks to celebrate seeing his kids again and falls asleep after the third Black Label, meaning he does not sleep well on Sunday night and is hungover. At 4.45am he is up, getting ready to walk to the taxi rank and head for work. He has had about eight hours of sleep since Saturday morning and clocks in to drive his combination through four hours of heavy traffic, offload and drive back. His mood is bad.

Spare a thought

Accountants will tell you there is no need for supervision at night – that it is wasteful expenditure. Tell them to drive a few night shifts alone with the misty ghosts in the Transkei. Let them drive through the twilight zone each night. Spare a thought for night shift drivers.

It is a tough job making sure there is fresh bread on the shelves in the morning, but someone will have driven through the night to get it there. When you complain about trucks on the roads, do not talk with your mouth full.

• Chisanyama (or Shisanyama) is a popular Southern African social tradition that translates to “burn meat” in Zulu. It refers to a communal gathering where people buy raw meat from a local butcher or on-site grill, have it cooked over open-fire coals and enjoy it with traditional sides like pap and chakalaka.

• Kwasa is upbeat, guitar-driven, rhythmic music – the kind of music you might hear on radio or at a social gathering. In South Africa and neighbouring countries, people often use “kwasa” casually to refer to an energetic African dance sound.