The Night Shift

It was just an ordinary Auckland evening. Nothing much happened. But as the streetlights flickered on and the evening rush slowed to a dawdle, Auckland’s night shift was just beginning. Peter Malcouronne checks in on five night-workers keeping the city running/ticking over while the rest of us slumber.

8.05pm Anja Jagalla makes a coffee and then leafs through a list of 60 New Zealanders in varying states of distress, in various parts of the world: a 31-year-old translator in a Peruvian hospital with severe abdominal pain; a 24-year-old snowboarder who cracked her wrist on a Bavarian pub crawl; a 56-year-old businessman in Minsk with a pulmonary embolism; a 72-year-old homemaker who suffered a stroke in Hong Kong; a navy boy with a busted hand in the same city; and a 65-year-old grandmother-of-three with gastroenteritis in Morocco. Most New Zealanders who require medical assistance while overseas (including our Super 14 players) will be patched through here.

Jagalla, a blonde 30-year-old formerly of Stuttgart, is working the night shift at International SOS’s Auckland office. The three day-shift (medical and emergency) operations co-ordinators knock off in half an hour and Jagalla will work through the night though, as an illuminated wall map illustrates, she has company in most corners of the world: International SOS’s 4,400 employees work out of 51 offices including outposts in Ulaanbaatar and Winhoek.

She gives me a potted history of the company (set up in Singapore in 1985 by two Frenchmen who wanted to give ex-pats access to first-rate medical care… now the largest medical assistance company in the world), then starts to work her way through the 60 “live” cases. Three, four times an hour her work will be interrupted by a call from somewhere in the world: a London-based travel insurance company, an air ambulance operator in Sydney, a doctor in Dallas, a wounded Chinese student in Hamilton.

“You’ve gotta be able to multi-task at this job,” says Jagalla’s colleague Matthew O’Connor who’s working through till 10 tonight. “It requires a certain concentration. A lot of these cases are very complex — you can end up making 40 or 50 calls on a single job.” About once a week, he says, there’ll be an “evac” where you have to move someone immediately by air ambulance. Like the couple repatriated from Samoa on New Years Day. “Moped accident — happens all the time,” O’Connor says. “He had a several broken ribs and she was in a really bad way — had head injuries and was in a coma.” Within two hours, a Lear Jet air ambulance had been requisitioned from Sydney to fly to Apia, to Auckland, and then — since they can only accommodate one patient at a time — back to Apia again. O’Connor made 42 phone calls in five hours: he had to check that the couple had medical insurance (the emergency flight would cost AUS$150,000); apprise International SOS’s doctor of the situation; find an air ambulance company that wasn’t on holiday; liaise with medical staff in Apia; and all the while keep anxious relatives in the loop.

It’s a stressful job he says and one not made easier by the hours. International SOS workers typically work seven shifts a fortnight — four one week, three the next — with a block of three nightshifts. “The first night’s the hardest,” O’Connor explains, “because your body’s not used to it. The second night’s better, the third night’s the best.”

O’Connor would typically go to bed a couple of hours after his shift ended at 8.00am and snatch perhaps five hours sleep. “It’s not enough,” he says. “And so you’re tired when you come in. You almost feel jet-lagged.” While O’Connor manages better than most — “he’s the only man I’ve met who can multi-task” teases Jagalla — the evidence is that no more than 20 per cent of us cope well with working at night. Imperial College London’s Russell Foster, co-author of Rhythms of Life, a book about circadian biology, suggests we’re just not meant to over-ride our body clocks. Efforts to do so, Foster warns, will have “chilling” physiological effects. And while there’s no conclusive proof of a casual relationship between shift working and sickness, research on insects and mammals whose sleep/wake cycle was rotated, found their life span decreased by 20 per cent. One study on humans has suggested night-working is more harmful to your health than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

Says O’Connor: “You just don’t want to work too many nights. It’s a bit of a twilight zone.”

9.15pm Jagalla finally gets through to a 29 year-old New Zealander who’d been teaching English in Phnom Penh, Cambodia before he got his jaw smashed in a nightclub fracas. International SOS’s Phnom Pehn clinic decided he should be treated in Bangkok and so, 10 days ago, he was flown there, business-class, with a medical escort. He had a two-and-a-half hour operation and has spent the days since recuperating in a nice Sukhumvit Rd hotel. Apparently, he’s racked up a lot in phone calls, internet and the mini bar and he seems in no hurry to leave. “His Mum says he suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder,” Jagalla says. “She reckons he should be psychologically tested before he gets sent back.”

But his insurance company, perhaps mindful of the fact that this is the second time in six months he’s had his jaw broken in this manner, is prepared to pay for just one more night at the hotel, then an air ticket back to Phnom Penh. Jagalla informs him of his fate.

9.32pm Next she finalises a business-class seat back from Townsville for an elderly gent who fractured his hip, then calls the family of a man who suffered a stroke on a cruise ship and brings them up to speed.

“The best part of this job is that you get to help people,” she says. “I know that sounds twee but sometimes you make such a difference.” She talks about a patient with a bowel obstruction who was so appreciative he later wrote a blog in her honour. But it doesn’t always end so well. “You have some cases where you’re bringing people back by air ambulance and then you hear, later on, that they’ve died.

“If you’ve put a lot of effort into a case — and sometimes you get to know the patient and their family really well — and they don’t make it, or the diagnosis is really bad, then it’s very upsetting. I’d have to say that’s the saddest part of the job.”

10.10pm While it’s easy to spot at night, Enterprize Steel’s red neon sign seems somehow incongruous, a bit showy for industrial Rosebank Rd. But inside Enterprize’s 100 metre-long workshop, you soon find evidence of good, honest proletarian toil: you see the incendiary flashes as steel plates are welded together and the shower of sparks as they’re ground into shape. And it’s hard to hear anything other than work here — the pock of the welding machines, the screech of grinders, the rasp of drills (and the duelling of two stereos from opposite ends of the workshop; the westside prefers Classic Hits, eastside More FM).

Nightshift foreman Umesh Prasad is drilling holes through 6mm steel plates for a job that’s just come through from Fletchers. It could be a brace for an apartment building or, more likely, part of the roof truss for a commercial building, though he’s not sure — he’s just got to finish four sections before his shift ends, as per the crumpled plan he has in front of him.

The other eight members of the night crew — two Fijian Indians, a Tongan, three Chinese, a Samoan and a Sri Lankan — are working on trusses for a new Coca-Cola Warehouse in Mt Wellington and rafters for Henderson’s Lincoln North mall. Prasad, a handsome 32 year-old with prematurely graying hair — think of a Fijian Indian George Clooney — says they’re a good team who can be counted on to get the job done.

They start each night at 5.00pm and will work through till 1.00am tonight. Usually they’d continue on through the night but things have gone quiet in the last couple of months. “It’s the first time since I started here (2003) that it’s been slack like this,” Prasad says, shrugging his shoulders. “Don’t know why.”

10.45pm Holes drilled, Prasad’s next task is to weld the various sections of the equal-angle steel plate together. In very simple terms he’s making a u-shaped frame. A three-sided square perhaps? “There’s no such thing,” he corrects. So that the structure is sufficiently strong, he first makes a notched cut into each end using an oxy-LPG torch. But he miscalculates slightly — forgets to allow for the thickness of the steel — and so has to shave another 6mm off each end. To slice off a sliver with this level of precision requires an artist’s deftness of touch but Prasad doesn’t seem to think it’s anything special. “It’s our everyday job y’ know.”

10.55pm Working on the steel universal beam that doubles as his bench, Prasad is now ready to weld the three sections of the frame together. First he tacks them together with a spot-weld before re-checking them with a square; they’re out by a degree and so he bangs them into shape with a mallet, then re-checks again. “Perfect,” he smiles.

“I love this trade,” he says. “You get a satisfaction out of crafting something. And most of the jobs we do here… you can see them.”

Like the Empire Apartments in the city. Like Waitakere’s new Civic buildings. “When you see something you’ve made… well you just feel proud when you go past them.”

11.15pm Wayne Dickson glances across at a large-screen plasma telly where, live on CNN, Vladimir Putin is exhorting Russians to have more babies and warning them of “the wolf.”

“Not much else happening tonight,” says Dickson, European Desk Client Advisor at OM Financial, New Zealand’s only 24-hour futures and foreign exchange trading desk. “We’re waiting on a speech from the chairman of the American Federal Reserve,” he explains. “He’s expected to raise interest rates by 0.25% — the markets have factored that in — so it could be a dead night. But it also has a lot to do with what Ben Bernanke says. And then there’s a lot of reading into what he’s telling the market, but not really telling the market.”

A capitalist functionary’s dust-dry pronouncements might seem to have little relevance to New Zealand, but if Bernanke was to raise US interest rates by another “tick” — another 0.25% — then the weakening New Zealand dollar, having already sustained a two cent drop in the past 24 hours, would sink another couple of cents in a matter of minutes.

The sturdy Dickson, 35, rubs his eyes, suppresses a yawn, and then flicks through today’s trading sheet with the 200 orders the company’s clients hope will be placed.

And these are orders across an astonishing array of markets. The Dow Jones, the FTSE, the Nasdaq. And the largest of these is the foreign exchange (FX) market with approximately US$1.5 trillion a day being traded. The main commodity markets are energy — West Texas Intermediate Crude Oil, Dated Brent Crude Oil, Henry Hub Natgas — but there are also markets in every imaginable product including canola, coffee, copper, corn, cotton, lean hogs, live cattle, lumber, oats, oil and orange juice.

Dickson keeps tabs on all these via four widescreen computer monitors, each split up into dozens of flickering graphs and a bewildering array of ever-changing numbers. It’s seems impossibly complicated but Dickson does his best to explain things in layman’s terms.

Let’s use a very simple example. Gold. The following morning it would reach US$705 per ounce, its highest value in 25 years. But can buy a gold futures contract of 100 ounces through OMFinancial for just US$3038, about five per cent of its full cost.

What OMFinancial offer is a collateralised trading service. It’s a little like spreadbetting with a bookie where he makes you put up some cash to begin with. Suppose you think gold is going up. You phone OMFinancial and say you want to buy a futures contract for 100 ounces of gold (currently trading at US$705 a ounce). But you only have to put US$705 up front. It seems too good to be true — modern-day alchemy. You’re getting the gold at 1/100th its price. Only this is not discounted gold, but massively leveraged.

Let’s work through the example. You take a gold contract for 100FTO for a month. Now let’s assume that gold goes up by, say, fifty bucks an ounce. If you’d stumped up the cash and bought the gold outright, you’d make about six per cent on your investment. But with a futures contract, you also make $50 on each of those 100 ounces; your initial investment of US$3038 is now worth over $US8000. Of course, what goes up can also come down. If gold dips by $30 an ounce, you will have lost all your money; if it drops $50, you’ll owe a further US$2000. This is a game for those with considerable kahunas.

12.00am The cocoa market opens; gold, silver and Dow Jones futures open in 20 minutes. Dickson’s colleague Robert Lovelock has just bought $AUS10 million dollars worth of Euros on behalf of an Australian bank.

12.40am Still not a lot happening. Dickson admits he’s feeling tired. He started work at 4.15pm and will work, with three colleagues, until just after 1.00am when the next shift takes over. His Mt Eden home is just around the corner from OMFinancial’s Newmarket base and he reckons he’ll get to sleep no problem tonight. He’s got an early start tomorrow: Dickson is also studying for a BA in anthropology and ancient history, something he admits may seem an odd choice for someone in this line of work.

But there are nights when it’s impossible to sleep. “Sometimes, when the markets are going off, it’s just this (he click, click, clicks his fingers). There are times, like the night of London bombing, where’s just flat-out. You’re charged up. You’ve got clients ringing up; these are all our incoming calls — 10 lines — and they were lit up the whole night. People selling, selling, selling and, later, buying back.” Dickson says they were trying to make sure none of their clients went down. The fact that OMFinancial is a 24-hour desk was a major reason “no one lost their shirt.”

It’s sounds like it can be an exhilarating if imprecise and irrational game. “Everyone reads the market in different ways,” Dickson says. “It’s a total gamble. People are gambling on what the markets are going to do. You have to take the emotion out or it can impede what you can do.

“Some people can get greedy. If something’s going in your favour, stick with it. But some people take the profits and think they’ll just run the losses to see if they come back in their favour. Sometimes it does, sometimes it hurts even more.”

1.10am Three nights a week, from Thursday through to “Fight Night” (Saturday), Mike Shepherd comes in to the Fort St police station to monitor 24 screens, each linked to the 51 police CCTV cameras that survey the CBD.

He’s older than you expect. Tall, fit, Eastwoodlike — he goes to the gym most days — Shepherd dismisses any discussion of his years: “Really age is not relevant if you’ve got your health, if you’ve got experience,” he grumps. “Suffice to say, I’ve plenty of experience.” But given that Shepherd first started on the beat in the early 1950s, later rising to the rank of Senior Sergeant, he must be in his early 70s at least.

He is an endearing mix of paternalist and hipster. “Yep, big queues outside Metro (Shortland St) tonight,” he says. Sorry, where? “Metro… it’s just ‘round the corner from where Cardiac used to be.”

But then Shepherd laments the prevalence (and scruffiness) of Auckland’s teens. “Look at all those young unescorted girls,” he sighs, panning a camera along K-Rd. “Bear in mind it’s after 1.00am.” He flicks past a gang of skinny kids wearing hoodies and farcically low-slung loose jeans. “Dress is not like it was when I was a youngster. The collar and tie is a thing of the past.”

1.20am A group of young Beastie Boy impresarios — Caucasian juveniles in policespeak — are clambering all over the Zeus statue at Myers Park’s. Shepherd zooms in. “If you see a flash, he could be lighting a cigarette or a joint or using his cellphone.” One of the Boys lights up. “You’ll probably see them puffing hard and then passing it around.” They do. Shepherd puts the call out. “Anyone near 20 Poynton Tce… we have three smoking cannabis in Myers Park.” No answer. “Ah, silence is golden,” Shepherd smiles. It’s a low priority he admits. “We can’t be everywhere at once.”

1.55am It’s been an unusually quiet night says Shepherd. “So far.” Even so, eight incidents across town have been logged on the police computer in the past 12 minutes including a fight on Quay St. Shepherd scrolls up and down the street twice before a police car arrives. “Can’t see anything,” he says. “Fights don’t tend to last long. If we’re lucky, we can latch on to the offender and follow them — then direct a car there.”

When he does get lucky, Shepherd makes a note in his logbook and records what’s happening (while all 51 cameras are set to record, for file storage reasons they save only every 10th frame). “When they know we’ve got them on camera — and we give the defence counsel a copy of course — they usually change to a guilty plea.”

2.05am: While the cameras are set on a pre-determined path to ensure maximum coverage, Shepherd will also manually “walk-through” in the same manner as a cop on the street. Barring interruptions, it’ll take him about an hour to work his way through the CBD. He starts on Queen St. It’s a beat he knows well. “There’s dear old Debra,” he says, pointing to an elderly, wild-haired woman wrapped in a blue rug. “She’s a regular.”

He knows most of the city’s homeless by name. There’s the “Plastic Bag Lady” who collects supermarket bags for some reason, Mike who methodically checks every bin on K-Rd each night, Heath who bangs his kerosene tin drums and old stooped-back Jack who likes to direct traffic.

The vagrants, as he terms them, are particularly vulnerable but so too are the juves (pronounced ‘joo-vays’ — police shorthand for juveniles). Three doors down from McDonald’s, a young man, perhaps 20, lies slumped in a darkened shop alcove. “Is he drunk?” Shepherd asks. “Is he beat up? Is he on drugs? Is he dying? You don’t know — so you send someone there to check up on them.”

2.14am: The stoners have decided to leave Zeus alone. “Forget about the cannabis smokers in Myers Park,” Shepherd radios. “They’re off home.”

A Sergeant about to sign off for the night makes Shepherd a coffee.

2.16am: The computer says there’s been a “10” at Auckland Hospital. A 10 is a death.

2.18am: Reports come though that a male Caucasian in beige cargo pants and Fifa Italia jacket is harassing women for money up near the Civic. Someone else is smashing a car up in Parnell, while another young man is threatening to jump of the Harbour Bridge. “Things are picking up,” says Shepherd, with a resigned smile.

2.20am A bloke in his 20s has just been robbed up on Edinburgh St. Two Polynesians and a Caucasian threatened him with a steel bar, forced him on to the floor and stole his laptop. Shepherd starts scouring the K-Rd strip, starting up by the Stairway to Heaven (“doesn’t look like much of a stairway when you see the people coming out of it”) and then moving back towards East St. “They call that the Kiss Bar,” Shepherd says, gesturing at a windowless red barn with about 50 Asians standing outside.

2.25am Police computer reports an attempted break in at the Ponsonby Village foodcourt. “That’s out of my jurisdiction,” Shepherd says. Meanwhile, down at the Viaduct, a Caucasian male in his 20s is “trying to fight with everyone”. A bouncer is holding him down and waiting for the police to arrive. But Shepherd, and all the available police units, stay up on K-Rd looking for the three robbers. “That has to take priority,” he explains.

2.50am After a frenetic half-hour, things seem to be settling down. Shepherd resumes his “patrol”. More hoons are harassing Zeus — “bet they won’t be up there mowing Dad’s lawns in the morning” — and then Shepherd spots a couple of young girls chatting on a bench, unaware they’re being watched by a dodgy fellow in the shadows. “I don’t like the look of that,” Shepherd says. “That’s a potentially dangerous situation. And they have no idea who’s watching them.” Shepherd brings up the girls on the large 21in monitor, presses record just in case. He’ll keep an eye on things.

“Sometimes, for some reason, a naive female will take a shortcut up (Myers Park) to St Kevins Arcade so I’ll follow them up as far as I can go. We’re protecting people as well — they don’t know of course.

“Saw a guy get his pocket picked — he didn’t know it. We got the offender, but lost the victim — he didn’t even know he’d been done.”

3.05am Outside Mermaids bar, strippers smoke in their “usual attire — virtually nothing”, while a portly chap heads home to his wife. Meanwhile, there are strange goings-on at the Strand Arcade: there must be 30 people sitting outside, smoking up a storm, and wriggling and rolling around on the floor. Most peculiar.

3.12am A battered ute is parked up just outside the station, it’s lights on, the driver conked out, his feet up on the dash. Shepherd zooms in on his exhaust pipe: “just want to check it’s clean and he’s not gassing himself… I’ve struck that a few times unfortunately.”

Shepherd puts the call out. “Looks like we’ve got a 1K (a drunk) behind the wheel on Shortland St.” He then asks a Maori warden to stand vigil until the police arrive. “I get concerned if one of those guys gets off — he could kill someone on the way home.”

3.18am A police car pulls up. Blocks the ute in. An officer taps on the windscreen and then wakes the snoozing man by shining a torch in his face. They check his car rego and license. Car’s not stolen. License is kosher. He hasn’t been drinking. They head back to the car and run some more checks. The man is “known” to the police but has no outstanding warrants. The officers hand him back his license and then rush off to a downtown carpark, beyond the range of Shepherd’s cameras, where a male Polynesian in his early 30s is “really freaking out,” throwing bottles and smashing windows according to an informant. Back at Shortland St, the ute driver rolls himself a cigarettes and puts his feet back up.

3.22am Shepherd remembers his coffee. It’s barely tepid now.

3.40am For the past quarter of an hour, Shepherd has been monitoring an unmoving young man who’s keeled over, his head in hands. He zooms in each time to check he’s still breathing. “I get a bit concerned. I’m a bit of a humanitarian. I don’t want to think anyone’s gonna croak on my shift.”

4.00am He doesn’t want to make too much of this — “it’s not like I deserve a medal or anything” — but Shepherd says his is a demanding yet rewarding job. “You’re helping make the city safe. You feel like you’re doing a good service to someone. You’re keeping the crime rate down. And, over the years, you might have saved a few lives.”

4.40am In the past hour, Colin Reuben has made 51 chocolate logs, 27 carrot cakes, 12 La Dolce Vita orange cakes and six Irish cream cheesecakes. But Reuben has no time to consider what has been a good morning’s work — he’s got nine lemon syrup cakes to knock up and the batter is not quite what he’d like to be. “Butter’s not soft, Joel,” he gently scolds his assistant. “There’s lumps in it.”

Reuben, a compact 46-year-old Maori Oompa Loompa, has been baking for the Rocket Kitchen — “the urban food store with attitude” — for the past two years. He usually starts at 3.00am but this morning he was in earlier, just before half-one. “Couldn’t sleep,” he says. “Had heaps to do.” Besides he just loves baking. When Reuben finishes at Rocket around midday, he’ll often pop around the corner to Pierre’s, a Penrose bakery and breadshop and work a shift there. He might just be the hardest working baker in Auckland: it’s not at all unusual for him to put in an 80-hour weeks, through in one mad week just before Christmas, he worked 125 hours.

He claims he only needs four hours sleep a night from about 10pm through till 1 or 2.00am. No afternoon snooze? “Nah, too busy bro, got too much to do.”

5.05am The hapless Joel has got 40-odd kgs of thick, viscous chocolate whiskey cake batter churning through a Tyrone Mixer. What’s in there? Reuben recites the ingredients from heart. “Seven kilos, 920 grams of eggs — that’s seven trays — 17 kilos, 360 grams of sugar; 14 kilos, 40 grams of flour, 340gm of baking soda; 3 kilos, 460 grams of cocoa.”

The 2.2kg chocolate whiskey is, he says, his second favourite cake, narrowly behind the Kahlua and hazelnut praline cheesecake. “You put on a lot of weight in the kitchen,” he laughs. “Work in the kitchen for five years, you probably put on five kgs. A kilo a year I reckon.”

5.08am At the same time he’s preparing the chocolate whiskeys, Reuben is prepping 30 trays ready for the double chocolate caramel slice. Needless to say, he can give you the precise amounts of the ingredients off the top of his head.

5.12am Reuben takes out two trays of carrot cakes and La Dolce Vitas from the walk-in rack oven, which is about the size of lift. Reuben also has cakes on the go in four fan-baked double-door gas ovens and two electric ovens.

Rocket Kitchen cakes typically bake for two hours at 150 degrees. “They’re looking good,” Reuben says. He “spring-tests” them — “see when I pat the top and it springs back up?” — and then temperature probes one from the batch. “81.3 degrees… spot on!” he says (the cakes have to come out 80 degrees or above).

5.15am Using a deft backhand technique, Reuben smears the caramel sauce — made with condensed milk, brown sugar and golden syrup — over the first chocolate layer of the slice with a spatula. The second layer of chocolate is, he explains, slightly milkier which assists it to spread smoothly.

5.18am Out comes the mop and bucket and Reuben attends to a couple of chocolate splatters on the floor. “A good baker always cleans up his mess,” he smiles. More seriously, Rocket Kitchen has a coveted ‘A’ hygiene rating and they want to keep it. “Council inspectors come in every couple of months,” he says. “Unannounced and at all hours of the night.”

5.30am Reuben checks a batch of espresso indulgence — chocolate and coffee — cakes. “Actually, these are pretty good,” he says. “Definitely in my top five.” He sprinkles chocolate chips over the top of the double chocolate caramel slice and bangs them in the oven.

Despite having all seven ovens chocker and three mixers on the go, the imperturbable Reuben finds moment to give a potted history of his life as a baker. “I started baking in 1985,” he says. “Before that, I was a barman in Wanganui at the Imperial — the Big I — the roughest pub in town.”

He started off baking in Wanganui, moved up to Auckland for a stint in the early ’90s, before returning back home to work as a trainee slaughterman. He then ran his own grill restaurant for a couple of years before moving back up to Auckland in 2000 with partner Jan, a chef at a Pakuranga retirement village, and his then infant son Liam.

His son, now six, shows signs of continuing the family tradition. “He’s been helping out since he was three,” Reuben says. “Makes muffins, peels veggies.

“Loves chocolate!”

5.58am Reuben starts on another 36 chocolate whiskeys. He will have made just under 100 when he finishes today. He takes the lemon syrup cakes out the oven and pours 450mls of syrup — sugar and lemon — over each. Is there a lot of sugar in cakes? “Oooooooooooh… yeah!” he cheers.

First published in Metro, July 2006.