Sea Captains Nap

(Photo from StaticFlickr)

One problem with being a space lady is that little details in even the best science fiction nag at you.

For example, in Star Trek, communications protocol is backwards from what I expect. What was the first word spoken from the moon? How did Apollo 13’s report of its explosion begin? With the name of the spacecraft? The name of the astronaut? No, the first word identified whose attention the astronauts needed. Houston. Anybody listening perks their ears if it attaches to them. That first word gets the right listener(s) to focus.

Every time someone on Star Trek taps their communicator and says something like “Janeway to Voyager” or “Picard to Enterprise,” I grind my teeth. They don’t need to say their name to let the comms system know who they are. Their technology is centuries beyond ours. Voiceprint recognition is child’s play for them. Why do they turn the protocol around?

Now that you’re seeing a starship the way I do, what’s wrong with the way we always see Jean Luc Picard’s ready room on Star Trek: The Next Generation? What’s wrong with the way he uses it? Or Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager. What’s wrong with the way she uses her ready room?

They never take a nap there. When in there, they are always sitting or standing. When a bridge officer asks to enter, the captain never needs to wake up. They are already awake.

We don’t yet have spacecraft big enough for a captain to have a ready room, so why does that bother me?

Because I come from a family with two generations of sea captains. Some of our godparents were also sea captains.

Sea captains take naps.

Like starship captains, sea captains can need to be awake, intensely focused, getting the ship through some tight spot, for many hours at a time. In peacetime, going in or out from a port may keep them on the bridge, busy and under stress. Or riding out a storm. Or steaming through a fleet of trawlers. (Russians used to sometimes put 20 or 30 of their trawlers around an American ship. Heavily laden ships cannot turn on a dime, and a collision with a loaded tanker can easily become a fireball. When the first prototype computerized collision avoidance was tried out on my father’s ship, it found the only passage through more than 20 Russian trawlers, each moving differently. A person couldn’t solve all those equations fast enough. The computer did.) In wartime, it’s worse.

Sea captains learn to take naps whenever they can. If they know they could be needed on the bridge on short notice, they don’t go to their quarters to sleep. They’ll nap on a sofa in the chart room behind the bridge or wherever they can lie down closest to the bridge. Throughout World War II, my grandfather pretty much slept on the sofa in his chart room. My father woke up every day at 05:00 no matter when he went to bed, but he napped when the day offered a lull. He could lie down on the floor and go to sleep in the midst of noise.

Janeway and Picard and the other captains of Star Fleet never nap. They sit or pace in their ready rooms, pondering, during lulls in a crisis when they should be making themselves rest, even if they can’t sleep.

So What?

Modern work is heavily oriented toward starting a shift and working through to the end of the shift, with interruption for a mid-shift meal, coffee or tea, and visits to the bathroom. (In some types of work, those breaks don’t happen. I briefly had such a job. Notice I said briefly. Working 24 to 86 hours at a stretch with 3 hours of sleep is rough.)

In some types of work, a rigid schedule is necessary. Manufacturing is not the only such job. My test team at the Space Center had to all be in place for us to run a test, for example. Hospitals have to make sure there are always enough people with the right training and skills to take care of the patients.

But not all jobs are like that. Plenty of office jobs could allow more flexibility than they do. The pandemic made many employers allow more people to work from home than before, but there is still a tendency to want to impose schedules that are set in stone when they don’t need to be.

We have a workforce in which an ever-increasing proportion of workers have Long COVID to some extent. It is important for people with LC not to push themselves too hard. Experts say so. National guidance for doctors in both of my countries say so. Patients say so. Many patients who pushed say that’s what put them over the edge to the level of reduced capacity they’ve had ever since.

Both of my countries, USA and UK, have more jobs to fill than people available to fill them. Both countries have lost a chunk of the workforce to LC. But some people with LC are still able to work, within limits. The exact limits vary from person to person. Part time, job sharing, flextime, entirely from home… What they need varies.

Often a conventional workday takes too much energy all at once. But if we can allow a midday nap akin to a Spanish or Mexican siesta, that can transform a job from too daunting to do-able.

Naps have nothing to do with laziness. Sea captains have to pass a rigorous test, and pass another every five years, to get and keep a master mariner’s license. It’s high stress, high responsibility work. Sometimes it is at its most demanding when the captain has been on duty practically around the clock to get the vessel through a difficult or hazardous situation.

We can’t say naps degrade people’s work. On the contrary, studies have shown that naps can improve performance. Thomas Edison took naps to enhance his creativity. Sea captains take naps to enable them to perform at their best when they are most needed.

We are beginning to see what happens when a workforce is too hollowed-out. We’ll look at that later. But in the meantime, we can see that conventional ways are not enough for the mix of challenges we’re wrestling with. We have jobs that need doing. We don’t have enough people available to fill them unless we make some changes.

Naps during the workday have been regarded as abnormal, undesirable, wrong, at most places in my two countries. It’s time to reconsider that.

Letting employees have a midday nap if they need it can help us fill jobs that will otherwise stay empty in this too-tight labor market. It can even help some employees perform better.

Sea captains nap. Who else can we allow to nap too?