What I Learned About Leadership Working the Graveyard Shift

Once upon a time I was a dockman, loading and unloading trucks on the south side of Chicago. (Teamsters 714.) I worked the graveyard shift: midnight to eight a.m. I took college classes in the morning or afternoon, and grabbed sleep when I could.

When you work the graveyard shift, you’re going to run into characters. There were countless characters at my job -- guys who had to work nights because working in the daytime world would not be a good fit for them.

When we had lunch at an all night diner on south Pulaski, we’d see more characters. The redheaded waitress, Tina, was one of them. She was a wise-cracker who was gorgeous in an all-night-diner-had-a-tough-life kind of way.

The diner's night manager, Gus, was another character. He was going bald but trying hard to cover it with comb-overs and gel, unsuccessfully.

Gus made pronouncements. He would say things that he believed to be universal truths -- to anyone who was willing to listen.

“This is the only friend I need,” he’d say, pulling a roll of bills from his trouser pocket.

"We've got too much freedom in this country. A little is okay. Too much is too much!"

The all-night diner was full of night workers from other docks and warehouses, plus cops, factory workers, a cab driver, night watchmen or people leaving bars and stopping for an omelette on their way home.

Vic was the night-shift manager at our trucking company. The night shift crew worked four to midnight. That wasn't my shift.

I had a different supervisor, but like everyone in the place I liked and respected Vic.

Vic was in his early fifties and looked like a guy who lived hard and slept little.

He had a big belly and his eyes were often bloodshot. He smoked two to three packs of Lucky Strikes a day, and he lit them with a worn Zippo lighter that he used to light his cigarettes as a grunt in Vietnam.

Vic swore in a way that was magical and magnificent. The way he cursed was Shakespearean. Vic would curse about the Cubs, the weather or a trucker who was running late, and it was nothing short of poetic the way he’d combine curse words and general slander.

Vic was horribly profane and hilarious in the same sentence. He had trouble getting through a sentence without throwing a curse word in. At the same time, Vic was a devout Catholic.

He wore a medallion of St. Joseph around his  neck and carried a prayer card with the Hail Mary prayer on it in his wallet. He went to Mass every Sunday morning, no matter how hung over he was, and he always put something in the collection plate.

Vic was hung over a lot. He drank great amounts of beer (hence the big stomach) and enjoyed his whiskey. He drank because his ex-wife hated him. He drank because he didn’t like the apartment he lived in.

He drank because one of his adult sons was in and out of jail and he drank because he was one thousand miles away from his grandson. He drank because his horse didn’t come in at the track. He also drank because he flat out liked it.

“It keeps the boredom away,” he would say.

Sometimes after the night shift ended, Vic would go out to a bar with his crew. Most supervisors wouldn’t dream of that. Mingling with the laborers? A supervisor spending free time among the workers? God forbid.

Vic didn’t care. People were people in his eyes. It didn’t matter what your skin color was, where you came from, who you slept with or why, or what social class you belonged to. In Vic’s eyes, “We’re all in this blankin’ thing together,” so drink up!

He knew the trucking industry as well as anyone could know it. He'd had every job from dockman to owning his own fleet of trucks and going broke doing it. He told stories of rolling into a ditch at night during a rainstorm in Georgia.

He crawled out that time without a scratch. Another time he was driving in a blizzard in Minnesota when he trailer jack-knifed and he ended up in a ditch there, too. Because of the conditions, it took emergency crews hours to get to him.

Vic’s crew loved to hear his stories. They loved the fact he was a colorful guy who went through life driving by the seat of his pants. He bent the rules and those he couldn't bend he found a way to live with.

Dockmen were entitled to a one hour lunch and two fifteen minute breaks during an eight hour shift. If things were slow, Vic didn’t care if the one hour lunch got stretched to ninety minutes or the breaks became mini-lunches.  

The supervisors had an office at the end of the dock that you had to reach by stairs, as it sat higher than the dock floor.

They looked through a huge window to see what was going on out on the dock.

We called the supervisors' office “the perch.”

When Vic was looking through the perch window to see what was going on downstairs, he wasn’t going to bust someone’s chops if he saw two dockmen taking a quick smoke break. Vic’s deal was that if things were slow, fine -- chill out, you don’t have to bust your back.

If there was absolutely nothing to do until the trucks rolled in, Vic believed, take a break - just don’t be an idiot about it. Don’t hide between boxes and take a nap. Don’t go out to your car and listen to music for an hour. Pick up a broom and sweep a little.

When it got busy and it was crunch time, Vic expected you to step up. That might mean working overtime, even if it was a last minute thing.

It might mean unloading a truck full of heavy freight by yourself when you thought it was going to be you and another guy unloading a trailer full of toilet paper together.

Because Vic was such a straight shooter and a humane guy, his crew would bust it for him at crunch time.When you’re working for someone who respects you, stands up for you and likes you, you’re going to make him look good, too.

Me and the other guys on the graveyard shift were envious of the guys on the night shift, because they had such a cool supervisor. Our supervisor was 0kay, but he was a serious, by-the-book guy too.

He was afraid he could lose his job, so he sucked up to his bosses whenever he could.  He wouldn’t write you up without a warning, but he wasn’t the type to go to bat for his crew, either.

Vic, on the other hand, almost never wrote anybody up for anything. If you threw a punch at Vic, he wouldn’t write you up. That just wasn’t his way.

One beautiful thing about Vic is that he was always in  a good mood. He laughed a lot, told jokes, made fun of people and made fun of himself more.

One day I saw him getting ready to leave his perch as I began my shift. He looked like hell. His eyes were more bloodshot than usual and he was moving slow. His voice was just a rasp.

“Jeez Vic,” I said, “What’s wrong? You’re not looking so good.”

“I feel like junk,” he said, though he did not say “junk.” He coughed and I thought he might keel over. “I’m gonna go home, have a couple of shots and crash the whole day.”

“Damn, how’d you make it to the end of your shift?”

“My throat’s blankin’ killin’ me. So first I smoke a Kool, ‘cause of the menthol. Then I go to a Lucky.”

That’s when I noticed in his shirt pocket he had half a pack of Kools and half a pack of Lucky Strikes jammed in there.

That was Vic’s idea of how to heal a sore throat. Coat your sore throat with the menthol cigarette smoke first before you light up the non filtered Lucky.

Then go home and drink whiskey until you fall asleep. Repeat until the cold or flu goes away.

Vic was a very unconventional supervisor. He got the most out of his crew because he saw them as equals. His life was an open book. Ask him anything and he’d give you an answer.

I don’t think every single supervisor or manager should be like Vic, but I do think it’s good for a guy like Vic to find a good spot. It's good for him, and good for the people who work for him, who did a great job for Vic because he trusted them - and vice versa.

Unfortunately for the night shift, Vic left for another opportunity. One of his adult sons (not the one who was in and out of jail) had an idea to start his own trucking company, just as Vic had done once. He wanted Vic to come aboard.

They would have two trucks to start with. They would both drive while trying to build the company. Vic was going to take the Denver to Las Vegas route.

It was hard to imagine chain-smoking, big-drinking, pot-bellied Vic climbing back into a semi and sitting behind the wheel for hours at a time. It seemed like the worst thing he could do for his health.

On the other hand, it seemed like a very Vic-like thing to do. After he worked his last shift as supervisor for the night crew, a few of went to a bar then headed off to Arlington Park to bet on the horses.,

Vic won the Daily Double and took everybody out for lunch.

Another guy was hired to replace Vic. He was a real stooge. The new supervisor was a young guy, a big dude named Paul. The only thing he had in common with Vic was his big gut. Paul wanted to prove he could be a kick-ass boss who got things done. He was a rule book kind of guy.

Dockmen were written up for being being two minutes late. Paul chastised people for working too slowly when they weren't. There was a lot of grumbling and discontent. A couple of guys transferred to other shifts.

People refused to work overtime. Big Paul was not very popular, and suddenly the night shift was not the free wheelin’, fun place it had been.

What happened to Vic after that,  I don’t know. I don’t know if he and his son made something out of their two-truck business or if it went bust. I hope it became a success.

If not, I know Vic would land on his feet. He was a survivor.

One of my fond memories of Vic was talking to him in the perch one night when I was feeling down about something. He dug in his pocket for a Lucky Strike and gave me words of wisdom.

“Don’t ever criticize yourself or get down on yourself, kid. There’s a whole blankin’ world that’ll do that for ya. You got to think of yourself as royalty, like you’re a blankin’ prince.”

Of course, Vic didn’t say “blankin.”