This one is the hand-off at seven in the morning, and it is not exaggerated. The day shift comes in with clean hair and their whole lives ahead of them, and we stand there looking like the last three donuts in the box. The nurse in panel 1 is a real person. She says good morning like she means it, every single day. We love her. We have asked her to stop.

Phillip and I said panel 2 at the same time, which is why the balloon has two tails. Nancy didn't say anything. Nancy doesn't need to.

Panel 3 is the Q word. If you don't work nights, here's the rule: you never say it. Not as a question, not as a compliment, not even in the parking lot on the way out. Say it, and the night turns on you. No nurse I know believes this. No nurse I know will say it, either. The day shift knows the rule perfectly well, so draw your own conclusions.

Now look at Nancy in panel 4. Hands up like the rest of us, and the face of a woman waiting for a bus. That's Nancy.

I lettered that word twice tonight, in ink, and I'm on tomorrow night. Think of me.

-- Kathy

Tuesday, September 21, 1999
Strip #4 is up. News from the schedule: I'm working New Year's Eve, 11 to 7. So is Phillip. So is Nancy, who asked for it. Somebody has to be awake when the year 2000 shows up, and it may as well be the people who are up anyway. I've already started that strip in my head.
Thank you for all the mail about the foil in strip #3. Seven of you have foil on your windows too. One of you uses garbage bags. One of you has real blackout curtains, which I went out and priced, and then I came home and kept the foil.

Tuesday, September 14, 1999
Strip #3 is up, and every bit of it happened. About the candy bars: I bought the whole box. The boy said nobody had ever bought the whole box before, and he walked home very carefully, holding the money in both hands. I went back to bed and slept until three. The box went to work with me on Wednesday night. Phillip found it in about four minutes.

Tuesday, September 7, 1999
Strip #2 is up. The counter went past 500 this week, which is about 490 more people than I expected. A night nurse in Arizona sent my address to everyone on her e-mail list, and they sent it to everyone on theirs, and now strangers write to me about their coffee. One of you says the coffee maker on your unit hasn't been washed since 1988. I believe you. I'm a little afraid of you, but I believe you.

Tuesday, August 31, 1999
Welcome to 11 TO 7, a comic strip about working nights. A new strip goes up every Tuesday, which is my night off, because I couldn't think of a better way to spend a night off than drawing work. Nancy says that's the saddest thing she's ever heard, and Nancy has seen everything. Strip #1 is about 3 a.m.

I'm Kathy Goldsmith. I'm 33, I'm a registered nurse, and since 1993 I've worked nights in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I'm not going to say which hospital. This is my page, not theirs.

Eleven to seven. People who work days think the night shift is the day shift with the lights turned down. It isn't. It's its own country, with its own hours and its own customs. There are fewer of us, and we know each other better. The coffee has been on since ten. Dinner is at two in the morning, and it's whatever is left in the vending machine. Somewhere around three the clock on the wall stops moving, and you have to push it along by hand. Then the windows go gray, then pink, and the day shift comes in smelling like shampoo, and you drive home with the sun coming up over Lake Michigan and go to bed while your neighbors mow their lawns.

I've drawn the birthday cards on our unit for years. Everybody gets drawn as whatever they'd most like to be. Phillip has been drawn as a weightlifter three years running, which is like a cat asking to be drawn as a cat. This summer Nancy looked at one of my cards for a long time and said, "You should do something with that." From Nancy, that's a parade. So I bought a scanner, and here we are.

One rule I keep: there are no patients in this strip, and there never will be. The people we take care of are not material, and what happens to them is nobody's business but theirs. Nothing medical goes in, either. 11 TO 7 is about everything else: the people who work nights, the 3 a.m. hour, the coffee, sleeping in the daytime, and the word we don't say.

Phillip and Nancy are real, and they're in the strip with their blessing. Phillip said yes before I finished asking. Nancy said yes as long as she's right in every strip, and so far I haven't had to change a thing. You can meet them both on the cast page.

Tuesday is my night off, and Tuesday night is drawing night. I sit down at the kitchen table around eight with the radio on and a pot of coffee that I make fresh, out of respect.

1. The idea. All week I carry an index card folded in half in my pocket and write down anything funny. Most of it was funny at four in the morning and isn't funny on Tuesday. Once in a while one still is, and that's the strip.

2. Pencil. One sheet of smooth bristol board, with the strip about eight inches square so it fits on the scanner. I pencil the four panel boxes first, then the words, then the balloons around the words, then the people. Words first, or somebody's face ends up behind a balloon.

3. Ink. Everything is inked with a brush pen: the people, the borders, the balloons. A brush pen is a felt pen with a real brush for a tip. Press and the line goes thick, ease off and it goes thin, and it forgives nothing, so I ink before my second cup. The lettering I do with a fine felt-tip, in capitals, as neat as I can. When the ink is dry, the pencil comes off with a kneaded eraser.

4. Gray wash. The grays are India ink and water, mixed in an old ice cube tray: a light, a middle and a dark. I lay them on with a small watercolor brush, lightest first, and dry each one with the hair dryer on low so the next one doesn't bleed into it. Bristol board buckles a little when it's wet, so I tape it down at the corners before I start.

5. Scanning. The scanner takes it in grays. I clean up the eraser crumbs and the occasional coffee ring in Paint Shop Pro, put the black bar across the top with the number and the date, and shrink it to 400 pixels wide.

6. Saving it small. Each strip goes up as a GIF in eight grays, about 30K, so it comes in quickly even on an old modem. Eight grays makes the wash a little blotchy. I've decided I like it. Under every strip there's a big version, 640 pixels wide and about 70K, for anybody who wants to see the brush marks.

Start to finish, about four hours. It's up by midnight, and then I'm awake till five anyway, because my body has no idea it's a night off.

If you're reading this on your break at four in the morning: hello. You're not the only one up.

Since this page went up I've had mail from night nurses all over the country, and from a lot of other people who work while everybody else sleeps: two bakers, a security guard at a factory, a cab driver, a man who runs a printing press for a newspaper, a woman at an all-night answering service, and a radio announcer who does the overnight show and says he plays requests for nobody. You're all welcome here. You're the only people who'll get the jokes, anyway.

A few things that help me. They're not advice, just what works in my house:

• Aluminum foil on the bedroom window. It's ugly, and it works.
• A box fan running all day for the noise. It doesn't beat a lawn mower, but it takes the edge off.
• Unplug the phone, and tape a note over the doorbell. Mine says NIGHT WORKER SLEEPING, PLEASE COME BACK AFTER 3. It works on grown-ups. It does not work on ten-year-olds with candy bars.
• Eat something real on the way home, not whatever is left in the vending machine at 4 a.m. I'm still working on this one.
• Once a week, call somebody who lives in the daytime, so they remember what your voice sounds like.

And if you're a day person who lives near one of us: when you see foil in the windows, please don't ring the bell before three. We're not vampires. We're just tired.

If you'd like to put 11 TO 7 on your links page, here's a button. Please save it to your own page as 11to7.gif instead of loading it from mine, then paste in this HTML:

Then write and tell me where you put it, and I'll come visit on my next night off.