As some students are waking up for 8 a.m. classes, the University’s night owls are just going to sleep after a night’s work.

“I definitely try to work more dinner shifts than late nights, but at the same time, I’m a very nocturnal person,” said Michael Ivey, an international affairs major from Athens who works at Choo-Choo. “Like, I don’t mind staying up till like 6 a.m. Sometimes I just do it out of habit.”

For students who are busy with classes, schoolwork or other activities during the day, working late can be the perfect solution.

“I’m generally a night person,” said Charlie Meador, who works at Snelling Dining Commons. “And they’re really flexible, you can pretty much pick your own hours. And if you need a day off, you can take a break, catch up on work, whatever.”

Meador, a first year graduate student from Valdosta majoring in social studies education, works Monday through Thursday nights, usually a five-hour shift lasting from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m.

At Snelling, he said, the student workers rotate between doing different tasks, such as restocking beverages and making omelets.

“I definitely like omelets the best,” he said. “It’s kind of funny, all of my friends are like, ‘Yeah, make me an omelet now,’ since that’s all I do, like, after 12 [a.m.], usually, because Snelling opens at 12 [a.m.] for breakfast. I’m really good at it now, so it’s a neat skill.”

Although he likes the flexibility of working at Snelling, Meador admits the late shift can be difficult. “When I first started, I was having sleeping problems. I went to the nurse to get some sleeping pills, because my schedule was off,” he said.

Other students with night jobs had the opposite problem, and relied on caffeine to stay alert in class.

“I work Wednesdays and I have class Thursday mornings, so that’s always exciting,” said Tadd Moore, a bartender at Barcode. “I always shotgun a pot of coffee right before class on Thursdays.”

But Moore, a business management major from Lawrenceville, said he likes his job.”It’s not necessarily like work-you’re just getting your friends intoxicated,” he said.

Bartending allows him to socialize early in the night, so he doesn’t miss out on much. “You come in late, bartend for three hours, and then after 2:00 everyone goes to sleep or orders Pokey Sticks… You’re only missing out on like three hours of the night,” he said.

He also enjoys the atmosphere of working in a bar and getting to participate in theme nights and special events the bar holds.

“Being able to go to work in — this sounds really lame — but like, Spandex, if you have a neon night,” he said. “You get to dress up, and come up with all these cool costumes … [for] theme nights and stuff. It’s like you can have Halloween multiple times a year.We’ll have superhero night sometimes, and I’ll show up as Quail Man, or something just random.”

Moore said bartending is more fun when it’s busy. “When you’re bartending, and there’s like two or three people on the bar, and sometimes they’re like, somewhat sketchy-not hating on anybody that gets out early, but that’s just typically what happens,” he said. “That’s kind of boring.”

Something he’s not so crazy about, though, is cleaning up the bar.

“Like, most people, I think, they come to a bar and they just think it mysteriously gets cleaned,” he said. “But you have to go in during the day for like three or four hours and mop the floors. You have to slave away.”

Sometimes the job requires Moore to go above and beyond the normal call of duty.

“One night, it was like 4:30, we had thrown a rave, and nobody had checked the bathrooms, and there was a kid that was just passed out, with no clothes on, in the bathroom,” Moore said. “So we had to figure out who he was and send him home in a taxi.”

Stories of customers’ drunken antics were common to everyone who works a late night shift.

“Oh, God. I’ve lived through it all at Pita Pit,” said Victoria Silva, a marketing and advertising major from Auburn, Ala.

A few weeks ago, someone broke the windows of the restaurant while Silva was at work.

“I was there, making a pita, and I heard someone knock on the window,” she said. “But I didn’t think anything of it, because when people walk by Pita Pit, they’ll knock on the window, just because they’re stupid. And then all of the sudden the window just slams in. I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ My coworker, thank God, and a guy [takes] off running, goes and grabs these guys and brings them in. Cops come, they’re really, really drunk, like black-out hammered. They don’t know what they’re doing. So they’re yelling at the cops, cussing at the cops, they handcuff them. It’s horrible. And we had to close Pita Pit for like an hour to clean up the glass.”

More common, she said, were people throwing up. “Like, that’s just what they do. I feel like people will come into Pita Pit [just] to throw up.”

People also get into fights in Pita Pit. “And the guys will break it up, because I can’t deal with it,” she said.

One of the perks of the job is the free food. “Like, I seriously lived off Pita Pit for like two months without going to the grocery store over the summer,” she said. “I think just the best part is that it’s really laid back.”

Ivey likes that about his job, delivering food for Choo Choo.

“Like, music is a huge part of my life, so I’ve got like 50 old CDs stacked up in my car that I sort of shuffle through [while driving],” he said.

Usually, he does about 18 deliveries a night, and said he gets about a $4 or $5 tip per order, especially on the weekends.

His least favorite part of the job is in the restaurant, where all Choo Choo employees have to pour containers of sauces. “Any worker at Choo Choo’s will tell you the most tedious part of the job is pouring sauces. Because, like, people love yellow sauce,” he said. “It’s primarily mayonnaise. But we usually pour, like, depending on what kind of night it is, anywhere from two to four bins of either yellow or ginger sauce.”

Deliveries can be interesting, he said, especially on the weekends.

“I almost got my car stolen,” he said. “I left it running on a delivery. I hopped over the fence because the gate code wasn’t on the ticket. So I hopped the fence, made the delivery, and as I’m coming back around I see the doors of my car closing. I’m like, ‘Oh shit,’ and I start running after it. I see my car going away, and I go like, I guess about 100 feet, and they get out of the car and just run off.”