About two months into my life as a full-fledged GM, I was given a night shift. The graveyard shift, where only about 12 GMs are working and there are less than 50 people across the whole of Blizzard Europe on shift. This is the time for hard work and making sure response times stay down to a minimum - or so I thought.

The coach that picks up all evening shift GMs arrives at Versailles Rive Gauche and a handful of use board the express to Nova Prospect... I mean Blizzard HQ. After making its rounds to pick up people dotted about the Versailles area, the bus sets off for Velízy, and the mood among the GMs is mixed. Some have only just woken up, others had not slept at all and wouldn't do so for at least another 50 minutes when they reach their desks. I was worried about not having the mall open to get my beloved Starbucks. :(

We arrived at the offices at roughly midnight, when the evening shift guys finish and rush for the same coaches that brought us in. As we pass our comrades in arms, we slap hands, swap jests, and on very rare occasions the evening shift would brief us on what the day's main issue was. The usual problem was "there's no Coke in the vending machines". Bloody great. No Starbucks, no Coke. This is going to be a long shift.

With the lack of the aforementioned cafienated beverages, I settle for some M&Ms and lukewarm coffee from the Selecta machines in the recreation room. Night shift has a few advantages, however, and the biggest of these was the lax attitude of working the shift. There were very few of us, and on the main there would only be one Senior member of staff on shift to manage all the language groups working the night. This meant:

- corner seats were readily available
- we could shout across the workspace without being berated
- the tickets, oh the tickets, were extremely easy

So I do the usual, as I'm well accustomed to by this point, and set up my workspace. iPod, check. YouTube, check. A WoW client logged into my personal account, check. The standard GM Tools... eh, I guess we should open that too!

With a sigh I open six tickets, as I normally did on a standard daytime shift. After a while, however, I start to notice a lot of offline tickets that only require an easy answer, or for the player to be in-game. (People who have exchanged Violet Signets will know that they need to be in-game to do this, before the NPC was added into the game). Within the first hour alone I'd done about 40 tickets, which was half the quota for a day's work at the time.

With the atmosphere so relaxed my colleagues and I were able to enjoy a longer session of table tennis, Tekken, and Soul Calibur. It was fantastic.

This was the best time to work, as it also gave us time to play. This was also the time that my friends and I created AFK Leacher Tennis, and subsequently a small tournament was held when there were absolutely no tickets in the queue. I love night shift. :) If only there were more of them for us to do!

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