Sleeping on the job? We did it for years
How my heart swelled on seeing pictures of workers blissfully napping in the “BBC snoozeroom”. Sleeping on the job has been a noble journalistic tradition, from the days when booze was most often the cause to our current age of being 24/7 on call, 24/7 exhausted.
Back when I was a leader writer, we would build nests under our desks to follow general elections through the night (the hours between 4 and 6 being long), or postprandial recovery (ditto). Many’s the article I have written to the snores of a beloved comrade, typing very quietly so as not to disturb them. At times, I have been that colleague, an editor once pausing to lay a blanket over me; the nearest I have come to sleeping my way to the top.
Readers who don’t know Michael Frayn’s novel Towards the End of the Morning, set in the declining days of old Fleet Street, should acquire an edition forthwith. My own appears to have gone walkabout, like every copy before it, pinched by a fellow hack. Those who do have the pleasure of knowing it will recall the elderly writer who dies at his desk, his passing unobserved since, while living, he spent his days in the land of nod.
Would that we could all go that way.