let’s discuss napping at work

by Alison Green on July 18, 2024

We saw a surprising number of stories about covert napping in last month’s thread about interns — which reminded me that we’ve had many stories about napping at work over the years, both covert and not-so-covert.

There was the summer associate who put on pajamas and napped on top of her desk .. the intern who tied his hands to the undercarriage of a truck so it looked like he was working on it while he was actually napping … a woman who fell out of her desk chair while sleeping at work … an interviewer who repeatedly fell asleep during the interview … and many, many more.

So let’s discuss sleeping at work — your own naps, intentional or otherwise, and other people’s. Please share in the comment section.

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  1. Massive Dynamic*

    After I had my first kid, I had a great pumping room in a guest room of the property I worked at. I sat on the soft carpet floor, hooked up to the pump equipment, and leaned my head and arms onto the seat of a chair in the room to take a 15min nap 3x/day. It was heaven, I tell you, as I had a reverse-cycling baby (stays up at night to nurse and get time with me to make up for being away all day).

    1. A-nony-moose*

      This is where I’m at now. And I use wearables so I can get a nice nap in without worrying about dropping my milk.

      It’s glorious.

      1. KaciHall*

        I kind of miss pumping naps.

        I do not miss the rest of infancy, but nursing was nice, and the naps in a comfy, climate controlled room (the pumping room had the only thermostat in the building that was adjustable) made up for pumping not being as nice.

        1. Megan*

          I had the office pump room key for 2.5 years as no one else nursed or had children. When I was pregnant with my second the key to that room saved me. There were 3 or so occasions in the first trimester where I went in there and napped for a good half hour to 45 mins. It was on the concrete floor, but I was so exhausted from creating a baby that I took it for the gift it was. If I go for a 3rd baby, I’ll probably end up doing this in short breaks in my car. 1st trimesters are hard!

          1. allathian*

            Yes, I had to tell my boss I was pregnant much earlier than I’d planned when she found me sleeping at my desk. I was 8 or 9 weeks pregnant and I’d only told my parents, sister, and in-laws. I told my friends at 12 weeks.

            I’m so glad that I was able to take 2 years off for maternity leave. By that time my son and I were both sleeping through the night and I was eager to return to work, at least partly for the luxury of locking the bathroom door behind me and eating lunch without constant interruptions. I also really enjoyed being seen as a professional rather than simply a wife and mother.

    2. Morris Alanisette*

      Yup, came here to post about the same thing. Napping while hands-free pumping saved my life that first year.

    3. Chauncy Gardener*

      When I was pregnant and working I used to fall asleep on the toilet at work. I was soooo tired!

      1. LadyAmalthea*

        I knew I was pregnant because I started dozing off in the middle of the day. Thankfully, return to office happened after I was ready to go public, otherwise it would have been reeeeally obvious quite early.

      2. History Nerd*

        When I was planning on getting pregnant, my in-laws were remodeling and getting rid of some old chairs. They were small, felted, soft chairs, so I asked for one and brought it to my office. Then, in those first few months of pregnancy when I just wanted to sleep all the time, I’d lock my door at lunch and nap in it. It came in really handy after my kid was born when I got to nurse her in it, too.

        1. 101damnations*

          We got a company holiday gift of super plush blankets and I just never took mine home…now that I am pregnant I close my door after lunch, put on my “do not disturb” sign, and roll the blanket across the floor for a little midday break!

    4. anne of mean gables*

      You are, incredibly, making me resent my private office with adequate privacy for pumping. Like obviously I cannot complain, I have a fantastic set-up for a working pumping parent, but the idea of a private, lockable, quiet, dark room to go to for 20 minutes 3x/day, with no access to my email inbox?? Heaven.

    5. Jojo*

      When I was pumping, my office had a mother’s room with a cypher lock that I was able to use. It was so nice. No one other than me and the nurse in medical knew the combination, so I never had to worry about anyone else barging in.
      One day I was pumping and…um…my skin was a little irritated. Actually, more irritated than I realized, so when I looked down to check progress, I was bleeding and the bottle was filled with red fluid. I did not fall asleep, but I almost passed out. Alone, in a locked room, and no one even knew where I was. If I had passed out and hit my head, I would have just laid there for who knows how long. It was a bit scary.
      I know realize that would have been an ideal place to take a nap, but I never would have taken advantage like that.

      1. TheBeanMovesOn*

        Normalize naps!! Before remote life I was a regular work napper. What can I say- my brain gets tired easily- I’ve car napped, under a tree napped, and my least favorite bathroom napped. The bathroom is the worst- but sometimes a necessity.

    6. Lizcase*

      I also used the pumping room for naps. I knew I was the only one needing it, so after pumping some days I’d take 15-30 min and just sleep. I was still sleep deprived enough to just fall asleep. Lockable room with no windows and a place to lay down = perfect nap spot.

    7. Chidi has a stomach ache*

      I’m in my third trimester and just took the glucose test; I crashed *hard* afterwards and decided when my 1p meeting was canceled (I work remotely) that I would take my lunch break then and include a very satisfying 20min nap.

      But I think my dog was a little worried about me? He kept nuzzling my face as I was first falling asleep.

  2. ursula*

    One of the best things about being the boss (with an office where the door closes) is being able to steal a 20min power nap on the couch now and then when I really need it. It has never once not been the more efficient option rather than struggling through a groggy afternoon. Reasonable nap policies, where they are feasible, are justice for all of us nighthawks who are forced to work against our circadian rhythms.

    1. RCB*

      Exactly! Working from home I didn’t at all feel guilty about taking an hour nap in the afternoon when it allowed me to work hours later into the evening.

      1. Andrew*

        same. durving covid, I was wfh for two and a half years – I’d start checking email around 7am and work until about 7pm – the company had laid off a ton of people and those of us that were left had to pick up the slack. A 20 minute power nap at 2 or 3pm helped keep me going. when collagues were impressed that I could manage the schedule consistency, I told them about the power nap. I got scolded by my boss for it and kind of rolled my eyes.

      2. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

        Ditto. Being able to take a 20 minute nap break during lulls, especially in the afternoon, is fantastic. If nothing else, just being able to put my head down on the desk for a few minutes with my eyes closed without anyone seeing me can do wonders. The open office we had before the pandemic was hell because it was all long worktables, no cubicle separations so everyone could see what everyone else was doing. I swear one manager felt it was their duty to catch nappers and I’d have my eyes closed for only a couple seconds before she materialized to ask if I needed coffee.

    2. Orv*

      I’m not the boss, but I have a private office and keep a foam hiking pad discreetly rolled up in the corner for the occasional afternoon power nap.

    3. Ann O'Nemity*

      At my last job one of the directors put in a work order to add a lock to his office door. Locks weren’t standard, but could be added for a legitimate reason. The director’s reason? He didn’t want to be distributed during his afternoon Power Nap! Management looked the other way; Director was in his 80s and had very niche expertise.

    4. JustaTech*

      This was a discussion at work when we discovered that the one “phone booth” room with a little couch had had the lock removed: why is it Not Professional and Not Acceptable to take a 20 minute nap if you’re feeling sleepy, but it’s just fine to spend half and hour going to get a coffee?

      Our best answer was “Puritan work ethic”.

    5. RW*

      I’m a GP, which means that a) I have a nice private room with a bed in it and b) I need to be on my game for essentially back to back meetings all day. If I slept badly or have a headache, I so often steal a 15-20min nap on my lunch break – way more efficient than trying to power through! (Once when I had a migraine I even did this at 5pm after my last patient left – I still had to write up the notes, but I couldn’t look at the screen until I’d had a lie down!)

  3. Cubicles & Chimeras*

    In my shame: during onboarding I nodded off during a training. In my defense, a training that mostly consisted of droning on reading off of slides in a darkened room right after lunch was the wrongest choice by the trainers. Thankfully another new hire was nice enough to elbow me when he saw it.

      1. Cubicles & Chimeras*

        This was 10 years ago, but our new hire group was pretty close allies! (And those that are still here, we try to get together every so often.)

        1. Four Lights*

          When I was pregnant I would nap on the floor of my cubicle during lunch. (There was a screen I could put over the entry.). I guess there may have been a wellness room but I was too shy to search it out.

          1. jez chickena*

            I worked with someone who did this. She had a glass panel next to the door. If you walked by you could see the bottom of her feet. It used to make me laugh.

    2. LadyAmalthea*

      When I used to run 2 week long intensive training classes, I would tell to students to find a poking partner, just in case.

    4. Anon for this*

      I had a training and unit meeting once that was terrible for this. Just like yours, the meeting was right after lunch, in a totally dark (except for the projector) room that was also warm and stuffy. One of my coworkers called me out on it, and I tried to stay awake after that, but… the deck was seriously stacked against me.

      (I also remember an early training once – sometime around 8 am – when I drifted off. Woke up, glanced around to see if anyone else had noticed…. and maybe 1/3 of my coworkers were also asleep? Guess the training wasn’t engaging enough!)

      1. Quill*

        Projectors in windowless rooms make me fall asleep like a bird with a towel thrown over its cage.

    5. Past Lurker*

      This happened to me on my first job – early morning training with another new hire consisted of a manager reading us the safety policies. She had a soothing voice. I nodded off. I didn’t think she noticed.

      She brought it up 2 years later during my last day! I was so embarrassed, but she was very understanding.

  4. Def Anon for This One*

    We’re lucky enough to have two mediation rooms (with a reclining chair and ottoman) in our office, bookable through Outlook. They’re the perfect place to get a 15-minute nap in, and reset your brain. That’s how many of us use our legally-sanctioned 15-minute breaks in the afternoon.

    2. Essentially Cheesy*

      I suddenly feel like my legally-sanctioned breaks have been vastly under-utilized.

    2. ferrina*

      I’d like to think that the commentor decided to get a quick power-nap in before typing the stories.

    3. Mtlwaitress*

      in restaurants that are closed between lunch and dinner it is pretty common practice for the staff who are working a split shift to take a nap on the banquets in between services.

    4. Lady Danbury*

      Hit enter prematurely! When I first started working (fresh out of university), my mom worked across the street from me. She was senior enough in her organization to have a private meeting room connected to her office. Many a lunch hour was spent eating at my desk and then going across the road to grab a power nap in that meeting room, with my head laid on the table. The transition from sleeping in whenever I wanted in college to having to work banker’s hours was rough. That meeting (nap) room made a world of a difference!

    5. Lady Danbury*

      Now that I’m senior enough to have my own spacious office (no meeting room), I’ll sometimes schedule a meeting into my calendar, close my door and take a power nap at my desk. We’re very much an open door office, so people only disturb closed doors if it’s a (work) emergency situation. Sometimes you just need a quick 20 minutes to rest your eyes!

  6. Alex the Alchemist*

    Honestly? Some days I just feel really, really tired when I come into work. I have a private office, so my solution is to drink a cup of coffee and take a power nap for like 5-10 minutes in my desk chair within my first hour of arrival. I almost always feel at least five times more awake afterwards and can get a lot more done.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Yeah, if you’re so exhausted you can barely keep your eyes open, you’re going to waste so much more time just working hard keeping those eyes open and not actually getting anything done than you would if you just closed those eyes for a little bit and woke up refreshed 20-60 min later. Or that’s how my eyes work, anyway. I really wish napping in the office was more legit here in the US but now that I WFH I can nap whenever I want. (Of course, treating my insomnia was an even better plan for me, but I realize not everyone has this luxury. Or even has insomnia.)

      1. Anon Again... Naturally*

        As someone with chronic insomnia and sleep apnea, the best thing to come out of the pandemic is working from home and more flexibility with hours. On those days when I don’t sleep well, I either sleep in a bit or nap over lunch. My quality of life has just improved so much.

        1. BubbleTea*

          Agree – I have chronic fatigue, and working from home (and now working for myself) made an enormous difference in how functional I can be! Not commuting for 1.5-2 hours a day helped a lot too.

    5. Brevity*

      Never underestimate the power of a power nap. It’s practically a total body reset, which, in fifteen minutes or less? Out of an eight hour day? Is nothing and amazing.

  7. Never the Twain*

    Dropping irresistibly off during a presentation in a dark room after a largish lunch, so the talk mingles with your dreams and you enter the conversation as you wake up.
    Been there, done that, braved the quizzically polite glances of my colleagues as I tried to frame my half-remembered interjection into a comment or question relating to something that I’ve not been following for ten minutes.

  8. But maybe not*

    When I was pregnant, I strongly considered getting a extra-large breed dog bed for napping in my office. I ended up just pushing my two guest chairs together and got many a nap out of that setup.

    1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      They have human sized dog beds now and boy howdy, I want one in the worst way.

      1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        Same. Unfortunately, I’ve already lost custody of one office sofa to my actual 180 pounds of dogs, so I’m pretty sure I am not allowed to have my own furniture anymore.

        1. Cyndi*

          I have one 40lb dog and yet have still somehow lost custody of my couch to her. She generously allows me to squeeze onto the very end with one (1) pillow but all the other blankets, throw pillows, and couch cushions have been reconfigured into Dog Bed.

          Yes, she also has two actual dog beds.

          1. Galloping Gargoyles*

            The number of dog beds you provide does not matter to those office mates. They will sleep on all of them and the couch and the chair and and and anything they can drag themselves on to lol

      2. Laura*

        I have a chair in my home office/craft room with lots of comfy pillows and a blanket. I also have a 60 lb dog with a bed in my office. My human 5 year old almost always curls up in the dog bed when he’s hanging out with me.

      4. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Oh wow, I had NO idea. I want one too but have no space for one. But wow, how amazing. (My cats would LOVE it.)

    2. Frank Doyle*

      Oh man I didn’t see “bed” at first and thought you had the ingenious idea of adopting a, say, Bernese mountain dog so that you could use it as a pillow

      4. KaciHall*

        Same. The thought of having a large puppy solely for naps would mean never being awake though.

      6. Daisy-dog*

        As the mama to a pillow-shaped dog (English bulldog), 10/10 recommend. She enjoys being a body pillow and dislikes being a head pillow.

    3. Silver Robin*

      I had to read this thrice before I caught that you said dog BED and not just dog, but I was so here for you getting a giant doggo to cuddle with for nap time

    4. Ghee Buttersnaps*

      Also when pregnant, I brought in a small workout mat and slept on the floor behind my desk during my lunch hour.

    5. Daisy-dog*

      I was an office aide in middle school and once napped between 2 chairs in a meeting room when I had cramps. It was a peak nap and I did feel better after. (The school receptionist approved.)

      1. JustaTech*

        I had a coworker who would get terrible cramps, so she would take a nap under her desk. Which wouldn’t have been too weird, except that she shared her tiny office with two other people (including one woman who had to pump in there because the pumping room was also the blood collection room and yuck), and her desk was only barely wider than her chair.
        So you’d go looking for one of her office mates and see what looked like a white pillow jammed under her desk, only to realize that *was* Coworker, wrapped up in her down coat, trying to sleep off her cramps.

    6. Old Mountain Lady*

      My federal government office allowed pregnant women, with a doctor’s note, to take 45 minute naps on real beds in the infirmary. It was heavenly.

    7. Quinalla*

      Haha, this is great!

      Pregnancy was the only time I’ve ever napped in the office. It was actually why I let my boss know about my pregnancy at ~12 weeks as the 1st trimester fatigue was horrid and I didn’t want him to think poorly of me when I accidently fell asleep a few times in my chair.

      I’m not really a napper, but if I wanted to, would be easy to do power naps now since I work from home :)

      1. allathian*

        I fessed up after the fact when my boss found me sleeping at my desk. I was 8 or 9 weeks pregnant and so, so tired.

        After that I napped after lunch with her permission and clocked in again when I woke up. I had my own office at the time.

    8. Melicious*

      I too needed pregnant naps. First trimester is SO EXHAUSTING. I hadn’t told people yet and didn’t have a private office, so I made do with lunch break naps in my car.

  9. Madame Desmortes*

    Just remembering my college days, when I got through a once-a-week graveyard shift in IT help desk via a foot-long sub sandwich and the gigantic-est of gigantic Diet Cokes.

    It was actually quite a good gig, everything but the hours.

  10. Clisby*

    I worked for several years with a guy who took a nap at his desk every day. There was no secret about it, and he wasn’t shirking work – we could take up to a 1.5 hour lunch, and he incorporated the nap into that. He turned out his light, and new people figured out pretty quickly not to bother him then.

    1. Typity*

      I had a co-worker, Max, who would nap for an hour or so every afternoon after lunch, without making any big secret of it; often he didn’t even close his office door. He was a decent guy and good at his job, so everyone just worked around it. Seeing the CEO shush someone who was getting loud outside Max’s office when he was sleeping is one of my more pleasing memories of that place.

    2. kiwiii*

      I did the same thing habitually in college — I would make sure I had at least an hour and a half between classes (and usually more like 2 or so) around noon or so and would get lunch and nap for a half hour to 45 mins. Definitely made having a roommate who abused the alarm feature on her phone less grating most of the time.

    3. The OG Sleepless*

      I worked with a guy who took a nap in his car almost every day during lunch. Another person at that same job had a commute that wasn’t too bad at 5 AM, but was an absolute nightmare at 7. So she would get there at 5, climb into the back seat where she kept a blanket and pillow, and sleep for 2 hours before coming inside.

      1. Bitte Meddler*

        At almost every office job I have ever had, I have napped in my car at lunch.

        At the last place I worked, I ended up having to drive off campus to a local shopping center because people heading to / from lunch in our parking garage would rap on my window to check to see I was OK.

    4. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

      I really wish my job would implement hour lunches instead of the half hour we have. The performance of my direct reports plummets after lunch and many have said they would feel more refreshed if they had time to actually relax as well as eat something. I try to give a stealth 45 minute lunch break where I can but some of my coworkers are sticklers for that half hour.

  11. BookWitch*

    I love my work from home days for a quick 15 minute power nap on occasion! I struggle with endometriosis and a thyroid issue, so 2-3 days a month everything is more difficult and more exhausting. Being able to lay down somewhere comfortable and let my body rest for a few minutes is a game changer.
    I’ve also worked from bed a few times when I haven’t had meetings and am feeling totally wiped out. My work gets done and gets done well. So why should it matter if I’m at a desk or in bed?

    1. ferrina*

      I love this. If you are working from home and the work gets done, does it really matter if you are at a desk? I tend to work on the floor a lot of the time (I’m ADHD, and I think it’s a sensory thing?)

      That said, I had a boss that used to work from bed and would frequently have the camera on. It was a little off-putting. Especially since we worked with corporate clients (I never saw her take a client call from bed, but there were definitely weird unwritten rules about what was/wasn’t acceptable)

    2. Whomst*

      Same hat!

      I really struggle with taking meaningful and restful breaks at the office. Got an accommodation that I can work from home half the day, and my life got So Much Better because I could make a good lunch and I could take a power nap when I needed it. Could I theoretically nap at the office? Probably. But I don’t trust like that, and while all my coworkers are lovely and would probably just be jealous, there is the optics of napping at work that make me too nervous to actually nap.

    3. Fricketyfrack*

      I caught COVID in October 2020 and it took me 5 weeks to start feeling back to normal, so I bought a desk that would slide over my bed and worked that way for almost a month. It was honestly amazing to be able to slide the desk down, lay down for 10 or 20 minutes when I was too fatigued, and then sit back up and be right back to it. I used it again after my hysterectomy recently. SO helpful. I don’t actually mind working in the office most of the time, but man, I do miss the ability to really rest for a few minutes when I need to.

      1. BubbleTea*

        I work from bed probably an average of once a month – it used to be much more frequent when I was more ill. If I’m especially achey I sometimes work from bath, though obviously not for meetings.

    4. Jen*

      Working from home was GREAT when I was recovering from the onset of a major autoimmune disease (after a month in the hospital and a month on disability). I took a short nap almost every afternoon for the first year or so but at first I felt a little guilty. Then I found out that my boss also takes a short nap most afternoons! I’m exempt and get all of my work done so when I need a nap, I take it.

    5. pally*

      This is exactly why I’m a firm believer that jobs that can, should have a work from home aspect built into them. This should be the norm.

      If the work is getting done, deadlines and KPIs are met, no one suffers from the doing of the work at locations other than the workplace, what’s the issue?

    6. Daisy-dog*

      A good 30-minute nap has been vital to me at times! It also means that I am more likely to be able to workout & do chores after work.

    7. Mermaid of the Lunacy*

      Saaaaame. I’m so glad to see this normalized! Sometimes that 20 minute nap around noon is the difference between a low productivity day and a great day. I don’t think I’d ever get called out for it (we are pretty laid back when we WFH) but I will dump a pile of articles on my boss’s desk about the benefits of naps if I ever do.

    8. Anax*

      Yeah, I take an hour-long nap every lunchtime, and then eat at my desk while working.

      I have POTS, and being horizontal and unconscious for a while to let my body ‘reset’ helps a lot. Especially in summer.

      I’m fully remote due to the same disability, but I would often catch naps at lunchtime in the office, too. It’s a lot less effective if I can’t control the environment, though; ideally, I need my feet above my heart, and there aren’t a lot of places in an office where that’s easy. (I was actually offered access to the lactation room, since it’s a medical need, but covid hit before we formalized that.)

      I don’t feel bad at all, because I get my eight hours of work in – 8:30-5:30 – and honestly, I’m definitely exceeding productivity expectations. I get a lot more done when I’m not constantly fighting my own body.

  12. Rhetorical bathtub*

    I nap sitting upright at my desk every single day; I turn my chair so that I’m facing the wall, pretend to read a book, and close my eyes. Somehow, my body knows when 15 minutes have passed (the length of my afternoon break); sometimes I actually doze, sometimes I just let my mind wander, and once or twice I’ve actually fallen very briefly asleep. And after that nap, I feel *so* much better; I honestly don’t know if my coworkers know/suspect what I’m doing, but I’ve been doing it for years and it hasn’t come up. (I do occasionally zone out and then come back to myself to find that my chin is on my chest– or, that my leg has done that “Oops you’re falling asleep” jerk that almost knocks me out of my chair.)

    1. Bitte Meddler*

      At my last job, our team’s admin would fall asleep in her chair every single afternoon.

      If anyone had a question for her between 3:30 and 5:00, we’d ping the person whose cube was across from the admin’s and ask if it was safe to approach the admin. (No one wanted to interrupt her napping, or put her in the position of being “caught” napping).

  13. Gus TT Showbiz*

    I was a teacher when we had our first kid, and after a couple weeks of basically being too exhausted to teach anybody how to do long division, I started taking naps under a table in the back of my room during my planning period. That was April, so I took naps through the end of that school year, and by the time fall rolled around my kid was on a slightly better sleep schedule and I could stay awake all day again.

    1. TLW*

      Teacher as well. I used to take naps under my desk during my 20 minute lunch while my students were in the cafeteria.

  14. Bruce*

    I work remotely now, and my attic office has a bed… Many days I’ll set my timer for 20 or 25 minutes and take a nap. Half the time I’m zoned out but still processing things about work, and I often have useful insights before I get up.

  15. dulcinea47*

    It’s been 25 years since I’ve worked anyplace with so much as a sofa in the break room. There’s no place to even sit quietly much less take a nap.

    1. KaciHall*

      My current office has no place to nap. It’s also in a really old (well, for America) building with terrible heating, so we all have blankets at our desks. One person just brought in a small pillow and would take twenty minutes naps under her desk. (She was young enough her back didn’t hate her for it, lol; I couldn’t do it.)

    2. Wolf*

      Any office sofa I ever saw was someone’s old sofa from home, and while they were comfy, I wouldn’t put my face on a pillow that has been in an office for 15 years.

  16. Not on board*

    It’s honestly a crime that most people can’t take a 15 minute nap at work. Working in a family business – sometimes it just hits you and you need to close your eyes and nap – and thankfully I have the freedom to do so, if it’s quiet in the office and on the phone. Usually if you’re trying to get something done on a deadline, it tends to keep you awake, but if it’s a bit slow, the sleepies can take you. Most days I don’t need a nap, but if you’re slightly under the weather, had a poor night’s sleep, etc., there’s no harm in napping. The other option is to go out to your car, take a quick nap (set yourself an alarm), and then go back inside.

  17. RecoveringSWO*

    In the military, it was perfectly fine to stand up during a meeting if you felt yourself nodding off. I really wish that would transfer over to civilian office jobs!

    1. IT_rocks*

      You can always use the excuse of your knee needing to be straightened once in awhile from an old wound. I’ve used that – but made sure I was seated near the back of the room.

    2. lurkyloo*

      If I’m leading a meeting, I often tell folks that ‘suffering is optional. If you need to stand up to stretch or wake up, do it!’ I’m always happy to see people do just that. I have no qualms about standing up during a meeting or training session to stand at the back of the room.

      And yes. I nap during my lunch time (WFH). Helps me get through the day.

    3. Harper*

      This is perfectly acceptable at most companies where I’ve worked, especially during long meetings or seminars.

    4. Blarg*

      At the suggestion of our conference manager, my org recently started adding some high top tables to the backs of our large plenary session rooms for folks who prefer or need to stand, and they are a HUGE hit. Some folks start out at them, and others drift back towards them during longer sessions. We also often host nursing parents with infants, and they really appreciate a spot where they can set up their laptop to take notes but also hold the baby, etc. Everyone wins!

    5. Yay! I’m a llama again!*

      80% more oxygen to your brain when you stand up (apparently!) so I don’t think it should be discouraged! More standing during long meetings for those who want to!

    6. Eeyore is my spirit animal*

      In one of my first training classes after I started working for the Army, an NCO took it upon himself to walk around and poke any of the soldiers that looked like they were fading and sent them to stand in the back of the room. He tried it with one of the civilians but got a look that sent him scurrying away back to his seat. (Yes, he was a student in the class, not one of the instructors.)

      1. Wolf*

        Yeah, when I worked at a university, we always told students that they are adults and they know how they function best. If you need to stand up, have a snack, or use the bathroom, just quietly do that. We’ve also had students who knitted because fidgeting helps them keep focused. And one who used every ten minute break to sprint around the building once – he said he had to get the zoomies out before he could sit for another 90min.

    9. Ancient Llama*

      About 20 years ago I was working at a company where it seemed the management always stood in the back of the room during briefings. I was a junior analyst and felt guilty taking a seat at the conference table, so asked a senior analyst about it. His reply: “oh, they do that so they don’t fall asleep.” The company was a lot of former military (DOD contractor) but non-vets did it too, so at least there it did transfer, RecoveringSWO :) .

    10. Alice in hinterland*

      And that is how I learned to fall asleep standing up during a particularly sleep-deprived portion of my training (year+ of eight hours a day in a classroom on 4 hrs or so of sleep). Half the class was usually standing up behind our desks, and at least once a day, there would be a loud crash when someone toppled into one of the bulletin boards lining the walls behind us.

  18. Mother of Corgis*

    Oh I’ve got one for this! I worked at a big box home improvement store for a few years, and we hired a couple young guys to work the Lot. Bring back carts, help customers load heavier items or large orders, flag for the forklifts, etc. Well these two, no one could ever get them on the radios for help. They would just disappear, then show up much later claiming they had been busy helping a customer. This went on for weeks.

    Our assistant manager went looking for them one day when we were slammed and had a bunch of customers needing loading assistance. She’s walking the aisles trying to find them, and calling them on the radio over and over. As she’s walking through the insulation aisle, she hears herself calling them on the radio. About two shelves above her head. Turns out, these two had built themselves a hideout in the upper shelves of the insulation aisle, where they would climb up to nap and hide from work whenever they felt like it (which was apparently 95% of their shift).

    1. But maybe not*

      I used to work at a big box membership warehouse. Employee of the Month with Dane Cook got a lot of things right about what it was like to work there.

      This also reminded me that in high school, I worked in a department store and when it was slow, I would go into the dressing room under the guise of getting clothes left in there to reshelve, but I was actually just taking a nap in one of the stalls.

    2. Ghee Buttersnaps*

      We found a temp sleeping in a large box on our manufacturing floor. He was angry that we had woken him up!!

    3. The OG Sleepless*

      That is awesome. The insulation and drywall aisles always do feel like a ghost town. Now I’ll be looking overhead next time wondering if there’s anybody up there.

      1. Mother of Corgis*

        Oh, they were fired so fast it made their heads spin. They’d even signed their names on the shelving where they were hiding out and had a stash of sodas and food up there, so they couldn’t pretend this was a first time thing. I was way outside in the garden department at the time, but I was told you could hear the firing from across the store. That manager wasn’t usually a yeller, much less in front of customers, but that one had pushed her over the edge. Most of us didn’t even notice a difference between the time they were gone and the store finally hiring replacements, because they’d never been any help in the first place.

        1. Commenter 505*

          They probably would’ve lasted longer if they took turns in the clubhouse. Of course then they’d each have to work half of their shift, but I’d love to see how long they could make it work.

    5. DawnShadow*

      I must say, that sounds pretty awesome! Not something I have ever done but now I kinda wish I had. Like kids building their own treehouse.

    6. Goldfeesh*

      Oh, when I worked at MallMart on overnights our manager hired a kid and he was the manager’s pet. One night one of the longtime associates found him sleeping in the dog food bunker in the backroom. The longtime guy said he wished he’d taken a picture of him but he was so shocked he said, “What the hell!” and woke the kid up. The kid finally got fired when he was found to be stealing CDs when working in electronics. A shock to none of us but the manager.

  19. SheLooksFamiliar*

    Dave Barry wrote a book in the 80s called ‘Claw Your Way To The Top’, and had a suggestion for when someone falls asleep during a meeting. Everyone should wait until the napper wakes up. Then someone should say, in a somber voice, ‘Bob, your plan is very, very risky, but you’ve given us no choice but to try it. I can only hope, for your sake, that you know what the hell you’re doing.’ Then everyone should silently walk out of the meeting room.

    All these years later, and I still think it’s a great idea.

    1. JadedAmber*

      Omg I love Dave Barry! And how did I miss this book! I’m going to go find it now – thanks for mentioning it!

      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Same! I didn’t know about this one, but back then I was a kid so why would I have? Adding it to my reading list now.

    4. Annie*

      haha. That reminds me of high school. Very typical that if someone fell asleep, the teacher would have everyone sneak out of the room. I was always a night owl, so they tried that one on me (to be fair, the eventual valedictorian spent 20 minutes trying to understand a simple Algebra 2 question, so I just decided to take a nap), but I woke up before they even started going for the door.

      1. Caffeine Monkey*

        Happened to me once – watching a very boring RE video in a warm, dark room had the inevitable effect.

        My “friends” snuck out leaving me asleep. One of the well ‘ard lads deliberately woke me up as he walked past me. I’ve always thought well of him for that. (Thank you, John Langhorne, if you’re reading this!)

    5. JustaTech*

      Oh man, that would have been really tempting a time or two.
      Twice, I had my boss fall asleep in a <15 person meeting where something really, really important was being explained.
      One time it was the person who was becoming our new boss – he came into the meeting (right after lunch) and after he was introduced and we were working out the logistics of who would do what, and one coworker was literally weeping that our current boss was leaving, New Boss fell asleep.
      Another time my immediate boss, who had a tendency to fall asleep in meetings, fell asleep in our 5 person meeting where we were assigning chunks of our next project. We all kind of looked at him, looked at each other, shrugged and stuck him with the least desirable part because, dude, you're asleep and you're the boss.

      Like, it's one thing to fall asleep in a training or a big presentation, but an active conversation?
      (And no, neither of them had sleep disorders.)

  20. Genevieve*

    I worked at a small institution of higher ed where the staff had their own lounge and a couch. The Couch was sacred and a few people (from one or two departments in particular) had unofficial dibs at certain times for their post-lunch naps. Things were a little cliquey at times, but mostly the nappers were left alone and everyone got along fine (surprisingly! Things were not always so collegial outside of the lounge).

    And when I was pregnant, swollen, and exhausted, everyone from the associate deans to the other nappers encouraged me to take over the couch whenever I needed to. The last month I took a mid-afternoon nap at least a few times a week and no one batted an eye.

    That workplace had some issues but they were very good at letting humans be human, and it’s the only way I got through pregnancy and my return to work.

  21. denimdenimdenim*

    I’ve been WFH since the beginning of the pandemic. We get an hour for lunch. I regularly catch a 45 minute nap.

    1. Stoney Lonesome*

      I used to work at an all remote organization. It was very much a results matter more than time spent in front of your computer type organization. I had one coworker who blocked off an hour on her calendar every day for a nap. Everyone just accepted that you don’t call or expect a response from Susie between 4 and 5pm because that is her nap time. It was kind of brilliant.

      I work a hybrid schedule at my current organization and I do take a nap occasionally on my work from home days.

  22. Ashley Armbruster*

    At my office job from 2018 – pre-pandemic 2020, I would drive my car during lunch to a nearby shopping center, park and lay down in the back seat to “sleep”.

    At the same job, I would walk around the building for steps. Once during a week, my coworker was sleeping on one of the stairways. I got back to work and told my coworker friend (who was on the same team as the sleeping coworker) in passing. Then he told sleeping coworker’s manager, and the manager ended up getting the coworker. That coworker was super bratty in general and would literally watch TV at work, next to her boss. At the start of the pandemic (right after I left), she was one of the ones laid off for “poor performance”.

  23. JadedAmber*

    One of my former coworkers perfected the art of napping at his desk with his hand on the the mouse and looking like he’s focused on the screen. People absolutely couldn’t tell unless they came over to his desk (the floor layout wasn’t quite the open floor plan, but had lower walls than standard cubicles and you could see people’s heads). He got away with not being very productive for years before it caught up to him.

    2. Annie*

      Yes, I’ve done that before. Just have the screen going and my hand on the mouse, looking like I’m reading something (facing away from the door of the office). Usually it’s just for a few minutes, because you couldn’t get away with that often. But I know I’ve been caught once or twice at my cubicle trying to do the same thing. But I don’t think it’s a big deal if someone falls asleep once in awhile if they are good workers.

  24. Harper*

    My last job was super stressful and had a lot of personal stress on top of it, so I would get pretty severe anxiety during the workday. More than once I locked my office door, closed the blinds and turned off the lights, and laid on the floor to listen to a meditation podcast (usually about 20 minutes long). It really worked to calm down my nervous system, and I regret nothing.

  25. Poison I.V. drip*

    One day I heard a huge thud from Frank’s office. I went to see if he was all right. He said he was. But Frank was known to fall asleep at his desk. I noticed a fresh hole in the drywall by his office chair. Later when he was out I went into his office, placed his chair on its side, and gently slid it up against the wall. Bingo! The caster lined up perfectly with the new hole in wall, which was even the same distinctive shape. The thud I heard had been Frank falling asleep and flopping out of his chair, running it into the wall.

  26. WeirdChemist*

    When I first started working in a lab for my PhD, my mondays were as such:
    3 hour-long classes, starting at 8 am
    Quick 30 min lunch
    TA-ing an undergrad lab for 4 hours
    5pm hour-long meeting

    I think I fell asleep in that 5pm meeting every Monday for the entire semester… luckily I sat in the back and no one but a friend noticed ever!

    1. Nonanon*

      If it makes you feel any better, I had woken up colleagues who had been at the lab starting at 4am, had class between timepoints, and now it’s noon, they’re asleep, and their alarm is going off.
      We also STRONGLY SUSPECTED there were times our PI was “unavailable” because he was sleeping in his office, so it’s just one of those things that never goes away :)

    2. Anonymous Scientist*

      I was an undergrad taking a very heavy upper level course load and also working 20 hrs a week in a research lab. I just didn’t get enough sleep period.

      One time I dozed off while sitting in row two of a large lecture hall (because that’s where all the left-handed desks were). The professor was one of my favorite people and I felt so bad for falling asleep in his class. After class I went up to him to apologize and he just said, “If what you needed out of my class today was a nap, I’m glad you got it.”

      This is only part of why he was one of my favorite people.

      1. In the provinces*

        This statement was in my syllabus for years: “Sometimes falling asleep is biologically unavoidable, but if drool comes out of your mouth, people will laugh at you.”

  27. JTP*

    I fell asleep at work once. I was a temp at a university administrative office, filling in for an administrative assistant out on medical leave. I had a then-undiagnosed endocrine disorder that was causing insomnia. It was first thing in the morning, I was the only one in the office, and put my head down on my desk to just rest my eyes for 5 minutes.

    Another employee coming into the office 15 minutes later woke me up. I don’t know if she knew I was sleeping. Nobody ever said anything, and I worked there for 6 months.

  28. LizzieLou*

    My first job at a Mom and pop office supply store. Our back room was weird that you had to walk down the hallway halfway to turn the light on, and there were no windows. One day I went back there to get something and tripped over my coworker sleeping on the floor. He was very much on the clock. Later found out he had a bad drug problem that caused him to stay up all night.

  29. Ruth (UK)*

    I have always struggled with staying awake all day. This seems to run in my family on my mother’s side and we all need a lot of sleep and tend to nap after meals.

    I remember getting in trouble at school for falling asleep at my desk, especially in the afternoon, though I would try to stay awake and hated getting in trouble.

    These days I work 4 days from home, one in the office, and so it’s easy for me to nap in the day. I don’t need to nap for a long period of time – I just need to be able to have a short sleep/power nap. I’ll usually fit in a 20 min nap as part of my lunch break.

    before I worked from home I found it harder. I would try to stay awake but struggle in the afternoon. when I knew I wasn’t going to manage it anymore, I would most often have a nap in the toilets.

    my previous work place had several cubicles with ceiling to floor doors that contained the sink and everything so I’d just lie on the floor in there.

    sometimes when I’ve been caught in public needing to sleep I’ve napped on the floor or toilets (UK toilets are easier for this than US ones) or just found the most private seeming space available

    napping in the day is not very optional for me. if I don’t find a time and place for it, I will fall asleep even if it’s inconvenient or dangerous for me to do so, and I have done when I was younger and had less experience dealing with it.

    I didn’t start driving until I was 30 and I am very careful about how this affects it. I won’t ever drive for more than an hour continuously and I will pull over if I realise I’m sleepy.

    I know if I’m in a state where I might drop off and the time between realising that and it becoming dangerous is at least 20 minutes or so.

    I keep a pillow and blanket at all times in my back seat in case I need to take a power nap there

    I’m lucky to have a job where I don’t really need to declare this as a specific accomodation

    1. azvlr*

      I’ve been recently diagnosed with a sleep disorder after years (YEARS!) of similar issues. You may want to look into this.

      1. JustaTech*

        One of my husband’s coworkers (at his first job out of college) was finally diagnosed with *severe* sleep apnea after their boss found him asleep under the gaming couch for the third time.
        It wasn’t that he was napping on the job per-se, it was that he slept through a Halo tournament with the speakers blaring and people cheering that had the boss concerned. “Dude, we have great health insurance. Your sleep pattern is not normal. Please go get checked out.”

        (This was in Big Tech, and industry famous for being night-owl friendly, so it wasn’t a case of a bunch of larks being unkind.)

      2. Schrodinger's biologist*

        Similar for me too, except my diagnosis was about 15 years ago. Finding the right medication took a bit of time, and now there are still some disadvantages but also some advantages (like being more awake than friends or colleagues when none of us got much sleep the night before, thanks to modern pharma).
        Before this, I also kept a pillow in my car for lunch breaks or if I felt myself getting tired while driving, and I still keep an eye out for good napping spots even though I don’t really need them anymore (I’ve got my own office as well as medication mostly figured out).
        Two key parts of my diagnosis were the daytime sleep study (not just the usual night study), and my now-ex pointing out to the doctor that I would often fall asleep while watching TV. I thought that was normal since I wasn’t falling asleep ‘suddenly’ (I’d have 10-15 minutes warning), and narcolepsy as shown on TV is the ‘fall asleep in your soup’ instant sleep type.

    2. a Disabled academic*

      I have a similar situation and have it declared as part of my disability workplace accommodations (as it is related to a medical condition). I refuse to feel shame about the fact that I sometimes need to lie down for a rest during the working day, no matter if others might think it’s odd. I think they are ableist. Unfortunately the rest space provided by my employers (a university) is a nasty room in the next building along with an uncomfortable couch, fluorescent light and bad smell. Fortunately I’m in a 2-person office (with a decent room mate) where I’ve appropriated 4 extra chairs that I push together, add a pillow and blanket, and nap right there when I need to. As it’s a set workload rather than set hours job, nobody cares when we are working or not working as long as it all gets done, so I just work late to make up for whatever time I spent resting.
      Sometimes my brain works better while horizontal, so then I read or write while lying down. Haven’t yet run doctoral supervision meetings while lying on my ‘couch’ but I might try it. Academics can get away with eccentricity :)

  30. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

    I did a brief stint in data entry, and it was so mind-numbing and physically uncomfortable (noisy, smelly, bad chair) that I’d get sleepy. The complex was massive, and one day I found a little nook with an exit door, a sort of unused hallway off another unused hallway at the end of an unused wing. I spent my lunchtime and breaks in that nook, lying on the floor on my side. Until the day two security guys rushed down the hall, one carrying a first aid kit, and woke me up, then grilled me about what I’d eaten that morning and if I needed to go to the hospital. I’d been spotted on a security camera, and looked “sprawled out, like you died.”

    2. Dry Cleaning Enthusiast*

      You needed a sign to prop up facing the security camera. “I’M OK”

        1. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

          <3 the Granny Weatherwax reference, but also knowing me, my sign would have said
          "not dead, just really unhappy at this job"

  31. Juicebox Hero*

    I had a coworker, now deceased, who would sit in his chair and sleep with his eyes open. He’d be sitting there staring into space, snoring. It was freaky and you could tell he wasn’t faking because he had rapid eye movements and everything.

  32. WorkerDrone*

    I went through a year or so of some kind of issue that never really got explained or diagnosed despite my best efforts (and has since mostly resolved), with intense fatigue and a total inability to stay asleep each fighting to see who could make me most miserable.

    Some days I would drag myself into work and immediately close my office door, make a little nest of my coat and a shawl, and sleep on the (linoleum) floor of my office for 30-40 minutes before I could even begin the day.

    Other days I could make it through the morning, but around lunch/afternoon I’d hit a wall and have to do the same.

    If I resisted the rest, I would be so brain-foggy, exhausted, and useless that the lost 30-40 minutes of productivity were the least of my many worries.

    I felt like the worst employee of the world sleeping on the floor of my office at 8:30am (or noon) and felt a ton of shame around it. In retrospect, it was what I had to do to get through a day, so although I still am a little embarrassed when I think about it, I don’t feel so much shame anymore. The work still got done, and to a better standard than it would have had I not passed out on the floor almost every day.

    1. BubbleTea*

      This sounds like the acute onset of my post-viral fatigue, which lasted about two years after I caught the virus that caused it. I was so tired all the time I could, and did, sleep anywhere. One memorable occasion I fell asleep dancing at a disco. Even eight years later I still had days when I had to call in sick because I wasn’t safe to drive (this was before WFH became a thing for my old job). No one has ever really figured out why post-viral fatigue happens to some people. Maybe now that long covid exists we will get some decent research. Anyway, it could have been something like that for you too.

      1. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

        I’m dealing with post-mono fatigue that’s probably exacerbated by having pretty serious Long COVID, and, yeah, that fatigue is amazing. It’s a little like being anesthetized. At least with mono, the fatigue comes from your red blood cells not getting replaced efficiently, so your ability to get oxygen to your cells is compromised. Hearing that made me wonder if you could have similar fatigue from ANYTHING that damages the spleen, like a physical trauma.

        1. Ari Flynn*

          Well, I have POTS, which results in chronically low blood pressure, especially in heat. Less blood is less blood, whether it’s from a shortage of red cells or an inability to circulate them fast enough, and I can testify that it does indeed make you tired as all hell.

        2. 1LFTW*

          I dealt with post-mono fatigue for *years*, and it was awful. I would start to fall asleep and have vivid dreams that I’d woken up and gone to class. I’m fine! I’d think to myself, I’m in class now, exactly where I’m supposed to be! So I’d relax and sink deeper into slumber… only to wake up in a panic, having missed class entirely. It was so bizarre, and it lasted for a couple years.

          1. Caffeine Monkey*

            Mine’s lasted for 25 years, more than half of my life. It’s always a bit weird to talk to healthy people and remember that, oh, no, this isn’t everybody, it’s just me. Other people are perfectly capable of doing things in the evening after working a full day.

  33. entrylevelpolitics*

    In a previous job, part of my role was driving my politician boss around the city. I couldn’t always go inside their meetings or events with them though – so I always kept a blanket and pillow in the trunk for impromptu backseat car naps. Considering my hours at the time were like 7am – 8pm, SO needed.

  34. Jake*

    I had been having problems with my neck and back. The doctor suggested that I could relieve the pain by lying on the floor on my back, with my feet up on a chair and my knees at a 90 degree angle. So one day at work when I was having pain, I lay down in the prescribed position in my cubicle. Some time later, I opened my eyes to find my boss standing over me saying “Jake, are you okay? You were snoring!”

  35. Apex Mountain*

    I’ve worked at a couple of startups that have Nap Rooms, pretty common just to go and close your eyes for 5-10 min

    1. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

      One of my colleagues has been lobbying for nap pods for our library for, like, eleven years. It just seems like the best idea. But it’s also what most of our students use our Interfaith Rooms for.

    2. JustaTech*

      I had a coworker at my biotech lobby to get a cot for the lab.
      If anyone had thought that he wanted it so folks could take a nap we would have been all for it. But we all knew that he wanted it so he could assign terrible studies where someone would have to be in the lab babysitting the equipment all night, and if there was a cot he would say “oh, you can just sleep there!”

  36. hi there*

    At an old job, we had a big comfy couch in an open common area. Luckily we were a small and collegial satellite office, so it was not unheard of for one of us to be shoes off, reclined, eyes closed, … just resting our computer-weary eyeballs or (for a couple team members) navigating a migraine onset. Would never have done that in the Big Office!

  37. Elk*

    Teacher, so WFT was brief for me in 2020. Without students in front of me I got so much sleepier than usual! Out principal started scheduling us for much longer staff meetings because of the way our student contact hours had changed, and I would spend every ten minute Zoom break napping. It helped so much!

  38. Honk Shoo*

    Once fell asleep in the break room after putting my hood up over my head and closing my eyes to get some relief from a headache. When I woke up the lights in the breakroom had been turned off and someone had put a jacket over me. I thought at first that I had slept through the rest of the day but no, my boss just figured I needed the sleep and tried to make me more comfortable.

    2. allhailtheboi*

      I had a friend do that at school when I fell asleep in a free period in the common room. Very sweet!

      1. Caffeine Monkey*

        Same! Piled coats on top of me and bags around me, to disguise me from the teachers who insisted on using the sixth form common room as a corridor.

  39. Caro*

    I’ve fallen asleep twice at work. The first time was in my first day in my first job out of college. There was a large shared office and I started in December, so it was both dark and cold – there was an ongoing thermostat/light dispute among my new colleagues so it felt like I was in a cave. My brain thought it was hibernation time and sent me to sleep mid afternoon. Fortunately – presumably because it was so dark – nobody noticed.

    More recently I felt sick at work so retreated to the first aid room. I feel asleep in there for at least an hour and nobody noticed. I realised later that I felt sick because I was hungover.

    Sometimes it’s good to be invisible.

  40. AutoImmune Bots Assemble*

    I have like four autoimmune diseases and they all make you tired. Not like sleepy tired, like I’m going to pass out tired. It was one of the symptoms that lead to my diagnosis – that and I was hospitalized for exhaustion multiple times.
    I found a company that would allow me to work remotely and make my own schedule as long as my availability matched their 12 hour window, which is great. To stay focused and functional, I schedule a nap in my day, usually around 2pm. I have alarms set and I wake up focused and with energy again.

    My project manager found out, and she’s a little bit of an over achieving boss babe and she constantly makes a big deal in the chat and during meetings that “Omg, OP I can’t believe you take NAPS. I haven’t taken a NAP since COLLEGE. I didn’t even NAP when my BABIES were born.” It was awkward and everyone is like…good for you? Also, the CEO loves my nap strategy.

    3. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

      “Mm. That’s interesting. Yeah, I nap because it increases memory & critical thinking skills while lowering blood pressure. To each their own!”

    4. perfect beasts*

      I napped like it was my job when my babies were born! Newborns are exhausting and every midwife I encountered during that period advised me to sleep when the baby did. I still nap when my iron levels dip below functional as well, and it means I can actually put in a full day’s work around the crushing fatigue. Your PM is bananapants.

  41. ICodeForFood*

    In the 1990s, at an insurance company, our purchasing department admin would curl up under her desk (which had files drawers on either side that were part of the desk, so it was a small space), block the light (and view) with a flattened cardboard box, and nap at lunch.

  42. Beka Cooper*

    I have two stories. First one, in college I worked as a custodian during events at a convention center. It could be really busy sometimes with multiple events in various parts of the buildings, but other times it was really slow, like in the daytime with just one professional conference, or an evening with only one wedding happening. We all had keys to all the areas, and we wore radios so we could be called if something was needed. Having started my working life in retail, I did not feel comfortable having nothing to do, so found lots of creative ways to keep busy. It totally never occurred to me to do what some of my coworkers did, and find a quiet, empty room, such as the “bride room” in one of the big event spaces, and nap until someone called them on the radio!

    My other story is working as a preschool teacher while I was pregnant. In my first trimester I was SO fatigued. We all got a one hour break during the kids’ naptime, and the daycare was in what used to be a residential house, so the break room was in the basement and doubled as storage. It had a couple of soft chairs, one was almost large enough for two people. I managed to nap in those chairs for a half hour during my lunch break quite a few times, with 3-4 other people chatting around me. Once I even slept through my phone’s alarm, and one of the other teachers noticed and woke me up. After maternity leave, I also pumped in that room with everyone sitting around, because there would have been no other viable place to do so. I just sat facing away. My coworkers were all women so it wasn’t too weird but with my second kid I was in an office job with locked rooms to pump in, and was able to look back at how crazy the first situation was.

    1. allathian*

      In our school system, 9th graders have a 2-week introduction to work course where they visit a workplace and do whatever they are allowed to and can do. I went to a daycare and was with the older kids, 4-6 year olds. During their rest time I read them a story and fell asleep every day. Most of the older kids at least didn’t, but herding groups of young kids is exhausting when you aren’t used to it.

  43. Another Chris*

    I am no stranger to closing my door and laying down under my desk for 20 minutes or so when the need arises. This has also been a major plus on the days I work from home. Gotta set that alarm, though! If I go longer than 20-30 minutes, I might not be getting up for over an hour!

  44. Microwaved Anchovies*

    One of my jobs required I work with an intern in her mid-50s to ensure various documents were cleared appropriately throughout the Department. Whenever I’d go to her office in order to talk face-to-face (she never answered her email), I’d always find her sitting at her desk, head throne back, mouth open, in deep REM sleep. It didn’t matter what time, what day, or how much work was sitting on her desk, she was always asleep until I woke her up.

    1. Kara*

      What was her productivity like? I’m assuming lousy, but I’d love it if she somehow managed a full workload despite being asleep every time you looked!

  45. Snoozin' on the job*

    I worked at a small store that sold handmade soaps, bath bombs, etc. my senior year of high school and during the summer after graduation. It was a small enough store that only one person was scheduled to work all day during the week, and some days business was slow enough that I wouldn’t see any customers for an hour or two at a time. This was in 2000, so I had no phone to keep me busy, just whatever book I brought with me that day.

    I was exhausted a lot of the time that summer, I think partly because of a mix of stress over going away to college and pretty severe undiagnosed depression, and there were many days when I struggled to stay awake. The store had a wall that partially separated one section from the larger main retail space, and I decided that since the door had a pretty loud bell on it that jingled whenever someone came in, if I went into the back room and sat down leaning against the wall I could doze off and would wake up with enough time to scramble to my feet and help a customer before they could get to where I was and notice I was asleep.

    This actually worked fine and I did it several times with no problems, although once a man came in from a restaurant nearby and tried to give me lasagna, and his lack of strong English skills and my intense grogginess made it a deeply confusing experience.

  46. 1st Trimester Naps*

    Early on in my first pregnancy before I made it public knowledge, I had an important conference call with my boss and an important corporate specialist. I’m sitting in my boss’ office with her to have this call with corporate that directly affected the work I was doing and I was losing the battle fighting falling asleep.
    I’m pretty positive I completely fell asleep for at least a few minutes before my brain jolted me awake again. It was mortifying!
    Thankfully my boss politely ignored it and I very soon thereafter let her know I was pregnant. She got a pretty good laugh out of it at least and told me it had happened to her too before when she had been pregnant. Now its just a funny story in the office!

  47. Honeybee*

    Back in college, I worked in the computer labs on campus. One of the labs had very high end Macs and was conveniently located right next to where the full time staff worked. This lab was one of the quieter labs because it was so specialized and it could very boring. One of those full timers went to that room because it was suspiciously dark and found the student worker literally curled up under his desk asleep. Like, out cold. He didn’t work for us much longer.

  48. Puggles*

    Many years ago I used to close my office door and take a nap during my lunch break but I stopped because a coworker told me the entire office could hear me snoring.

  49. It's Fine*

    For my first few years of working I used my lunch break to nap in my car. Even in the dead of summer/winter! I’m recently discovering the oodles of health issues that contribute to my sleepiness :)

    Now we’re in a new office that has a Wellness Room – it has a recliner, a small noise machine that is usually set to waves or rain, yoga mats, coloring books, a biiiig pillow. And of course no windows and a sign to flip to indicate if it’s occupied or not so no one barges in by mistake. I love being able to nip in there for a 20 min eye break, especially since it’s work-provided. It takes away that feeling of having to hide that I need a break like this. It’s normal, it’s fine. It’s Fine!

  50. Anon and on and on*

    I herniated a disk in my neck and was in incredible amounts of pain that was being (somewhat) managed through the use of a narcotic pain killer, a muscle relaxant, and a nerve blocker. I worked at home during that time and scheduled a 1pm meeting with myself every day so I could sleep off the combined effects of all three when I took them at lunch. Each of them was taken after a different length of time, but noon was the only time all three of them lined up. After an hour, I’d be good to go and was available for meetings and/or could actually get work done. That only lasted a couple of months, but I was grateful for the flexibility from my boss.

  51. Barnaby Jones*

    I worked graveyard at a work-study job at a 24-hour library a couple of nights a week during college. We had one full-time supervisor overnight, and the other full-time staff knew she had two other jobs. What they didn’t know was that she basically slept her entire shift at the library every night. She “worked” from midnight to 8 am. The previous night’s staff was gone shortly after midnight, and she was asleep under her desk by 12:30. Morning staff started coming in around 7, so she set an alarm for 6:30.
    There were some tasks that required a staff member and not a work-study student. That didn’t come up much, but she gave us all her passwords and instructions on how to use them so we wouldn’t bother her. I worked with her for about a year, and she was there before I started, probably doing the same routine the whole time. We kept her secret in part because she brought in pizza or donuts every now and then and in part because the student workers didn’t particularly want a real supervisor who would make us do work stuff instead of studying or just staring into space.
    She did get caught and fired eventually. I don’t know if anyone told on her or her boss stumbled onto her by accident. Her manager told me later he found her asleep at 3 am one night, but, since she is entitled to an hour of lunch, he had to wait an hour and a half to make sure it wasn’t just a lunch nap. Of course she was still asleep when he checked back in.
    I’m not sure if 30 hours of sleep a week for at least a year qualifies as “napping.” It’s more like getting paid to have a second bedroom.

    1. BubbleTea*

      I’m not sure why anyone was surprised that someone working three full time jobs spent the night time one asleep. Why was that even allowed, sleep or not?

  52. Audrey Puffins*

    I love a lunchtime nap. My key thing is to be aware of ideal napping lengths (12 minute micro nap, 24-27 minute power nap, 45 minute normal nap; any variation from these lengths absolutely wipes me out) and to make sure my watch alarm is set. It’s worth bearing in mind that the point of a nap is to recharge your batteries, rather than catching any functional sleep, and just sitting/lying down with your eyes shut is absolutely fine, even if you don’t lose consciousness once. I have been very lucky to work in places with comfortable sofas and relaxed attitudes to what I do with my lunch break

  53. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

    I’m not much of a napper, which means that any time I step away from my office and DO actually lay down on the living room sofa, my husband gets very solicitous, “Don’t worry about dinner tonight, I’ll order takeout, you rest.” I try not to use this superpower indiscriminately.

  54. Folklorist*

    In my early-mid 20’s, when I was just starting my career, I was a party animal! I would often stay out late the night before work and go into work…not feeling so great. I had my own office that had a door that shut (and no window!), so I kept a small stuffed animal on top of my computer that became a pillow during lunch time…and a small blanket that I kept in my desk.

    Most lunch times, I would bring my own, shut my door, and take an hour nap under my desk–fully stretched out on the floor! No one ever caught me and I thought that I was brilliant. (Or at least, if anyone knew, they never gave me crap about it.)

    My next job, however, I tried to do this on one of my first days. My boss, thinking I was out at lunch, burst into my office to get something, only to find me fully asleep on the floor! That was…awkward. So, after that, I would leave for lunch, drive my car to a dark and secluded spot in the parking garage, and take a 45 minute nap in the backseat.

    At another job that I held for 8 years, I didn’t have any privacy at all (or a car!) because I shared an office with my boss and another colleague. We DID have a small closet that was set aside as a place where people could take personal phone calls since we were fairly open plan and everyone knew everyone else’s business. If I was desperately tired, I’d go in there, lock the door, set a timer for 15 minutes and close my eyes. (I’d read a study that, in many cases, just sitting in the dark with your eyes closed for 15-20 minutes had the same effectiveness as a nap a lot of the time!) That was also very helpful!

    Nowadays, I don’t sleep in the office anymore, but on my WFH days, I occasionally take a quick snooze as long as I know I’m getting my work done. I don’t drink or party anymore–and haven’t for a long time!–so I wish I had a better excuse! I just think that this is how my body works at this point.

  55. Jester*

    Last year, I had one of the worst colds in my life. It was definitely not COVID, but the gems were still out for revenge for me not getting sick for so long between lockdown and masking. The doctor gave me a cough suppressant and no one warned me that this stuff would make me drowsier than a handful of Benadryl. Fortunately, I work from home, so I would force myself to stay awake to write one email and then crash for a twenty-minute chunk. Repeat until the meds wore off. That was the last time I took that stuff during a workday.

  56. learnedthehardway*

    My father always used to crash when he came home from work for an hour – his nap was sacrosanct.

    Totally get it, now that I’m over 40 – I have a nap most afternoons. I schedule it in my calendar and set an alarm so I don’t miss my next meeting. Helps that I work from home.

    Siestas are a thing in warm countries – I figure that global warming is as good an excuse as any to move the tradition to more northerly climates!!

  57. pinyata*

    I used to have a coworker who would go into a small closet, sit on the floor with his knees up and phone positioned just so on his ear and then fall asleep. So that if someone opened the door, they would just think he was doing the very normal action of taking a phone call in a small dark closet…

    I feel very strongly that nap rooms should be a thing at all workplaces. Sometimes all you need is a quick 10-20 minutes.

  58. irritable vowel*

    Back when I was a hard-partying 20-something, I worked at a small college where I provided audiovisual services for classrooms, among other things. This meant I had keys to storage closets all over campus where equipment was stored. On more than one occasion I would take a little snooze break in one of those closets. Sadly, I seem to have lost my ability (or perhaps need) to nap, now that I work from home and could easily take a nap in my own bed at any time of day.

  59. desk platypus*

    I have an awful sleep schedule so I usually end up nodding off at my desk and more than once I’ve realized I’ve accidentally fallen asleep for five minutes. Luckily I don’t have a lot of direct supervision and look like I’m studying materials on my desk when my head’s angled down, but it’s still mortifying and I dread getting caught. Some days if I can already feel that I’m just going to be dead on my feet I’ll call out for the morning claiming some other issue.

    1. Anon Y Mouse*

      Honestly, same. I am perimenopausal and it has done a number on my body clock. I have an office that locks, and am seriously considering getting a mat or something and just napping during my lunch break. I don’t have a car, so I can’t do that instead.

  60. TorchDuck*

    We had an employee with an undiagnosed sleep disorder. They kept falling asleep at their desk, occasionally snoring. HR talked to them, but they never got around to going to the doctor. Finally, one day, they fell out of their chair during one of their spells. I had to take them to the ER because they cut the bridge of their nose badly enough it needed stitches. That was the impetus to finally get a diagnosis. With treatment, they were able to work full days and stayed for several more years.

  61. Marzipan Dragon*

    Very timely read as I sit here, fighting off the Benedryl drowsiness during a brutal allergy season. We do have a lounge with a sofa that would be perfectly acceptable to take a nap in but allergy medicine drowsiness would lead to a 2 hour nap over a 20 minute one.

  62. PercyJax*

    In a previous job, I had a coworker that took naps. As a big proponent of naps, I had no problem with that on its own. However, he also snored. Loudly. And we had cubicles, so it wasn’t like he could hide it behind a closed door.

    It happened relatively frequently, and at varying times during the day. I don’t know if anyone ever said anything to him, but we all definitely knew it was happening!

  63. Higher Ed Admin*

    I definitely can fit in a WFH nap most days. But in the office, there have been times when I was SO exhausted for various reasons where I crawled under my desk to rest for 20-30 minutes. We also used to have yoga at my office once a week and that end-of-class shavasana was deadly.

  64. JustMyImagination*

    I was pregnant in 2020 during lockdowns. I had a standing 2pm meeting with my couch.

  65. Whomst*

    I haven’t been brave enough to try it at work, but when I was in college (majoring in Computer Science) I was a huge fan of the debugging nap. Debugging nap works as follows: start working on homework/studying until you hit a point where you’re starting to get confused/tangled up. The kind where you’ve looked through your notes, done a google search, and you’re still unsure of the solution. Then you go take a nap. When you wake up, immediately revisit the problem and 85% of the time the solution to the problem is either immediately apparent or is resolved within the next 15 minutes.

    I have discussed this with colleagues, and they said they have had similar experiences and wish we could do that at work, so I probably have the bandwidth that I could do it without being seen as a slacker. But I can’t bring myself to nap at work, being physically in the office puts a mental block on sleeping for me.

    2. Pokemon Go To The Polls*

      If you can’t nap, I’ve found that a walk outside serves the same purpose when it comes to solving a problem, and it has better optics than a nap for a lot of people (which is silly because if the nap gets you to the solution faster, who cares?)

      1. Whomst*

        While I find walks definitely helpful, they’ve never been quite as effective as a nap for me. Bumps the success rate to 50% or so, when a nap almost always works for me. Not sure why it is, but I used to joke that I was just smarter while unconscious.

      2. Azure Jane Lunatic*

        A couple of colleagues and I used to do milkshake walks: a nice 10 minute stroll to the on-site cafe that had milk, ice cream, and a blender. Sometimes it was thorny technical problems; more often, it was thorny workplace politics.

    3. Gumby*

      I haven’t coded anything significant in years but in college I dreamed the answer to whatever was stymying me on a regular basis. I never thought to arrange a nap for the purpose though – I’d just dream it overnight. It only got frustrating once when I was *sure* I had dreamed the answer but couldn’t remember the solution upon waking up.

  66. Lab Boss*

    No lab naps.

    But when I worked at summer camp, every day we had about an hour of totally free time right after lunch. Zero responsibilities. I would go out to the shooting ranges (totally closed off to campers at that time), leave a big warning note for my boss so he knew where I was, and drag one of the mats we used for prone shooting up on top of the 30-foot hill we used as a backstop. For safety reasons there couldn’t be trees nearby so there was always a lovely breeze, and a view off forever, and the drone of the bugs, and I would sleep the sleep of the totally physically exhausted. I’ll never nap that well again.

    1. Cedrus Libani*

      Much of my PhD data was collected in the microscope room. Pitch dark, climate controlled, white noise…if you think I never took a nap in there, I’ve got a Nature paper to sell you.

    2. Grilledcheeser*

      Having worked a summer camp shooting range, I join you in those utterly silent prone mat moments! Our range overlooked a lake & got a great breeze. The whole staff would trundle up the hill, place our mats, & bliss out for an hour. Rumors abounded that we were all hooking up, but truly, it was just blessed sleeeeeeeeeep.

  67. WannabeAstronaut*

    I have idiopathic hypersomnia and daily naps are not optional (and are actually part of my treatment plan). Luckily everywhere I have worked has been very accommodating of this. Before I was diagnosed it was very embarrassing and people would get really offended by me falling asleep even though I really couldn’t control it even with caffeine, cold water, standing up (I have fallen asleep while in a standing meeting before..). People have weird hangups about sleep, especially here in the USA, where it feels like a moral failure to sleep “too much” or to actually NEED sleep. It sucks.

    1. Roy Donk*

      I also have IH (although weirdly it’s been in remission for about 4 years *fingers crossed*), and once, in the middle of a particularly rough patch with sleep, I was sent out of the country for a work assignment. Jet lag + my already wack sleep = one day I woke up at 4 pm. I was supposed to be at the office at 9. I was mortified but luckily my boss knew what I was dealing with and just told the people in the office I wasn’t feeling well.

    2. Cedrus Libani*

      Yeah, me too. Between the ages of 15-28, I don’t think I stayed awake for the full duration of a single one-hour class / meeting / etc. I’d always have at least one microsleep. During high school, I was absolutely leaning into this, because you can require me to be physically present but you can’t actually require me to be conscious. But then I couldn’t stop. It was within my range to fall asleep while walking; I refused to drive.

      People definitely assumed I was being intentionally rude, or flaunting my poor work ethic, and/or such a hot mess in my personal life that I couldn’t show up to work properly rested. Dude, I’m not doing it AT you, it’s just a bad habit that I can’t seem to shake…

      Turned out to be an autoimmune issue. Got it sorted, fine now.

    3. allathian*

      When I was newly pregnant, I fell asleep on the commuter train, standing up. I woke up hugging one of the vertical support bars when they announced my stop.

  68. Youngin*

    Has anyone seen that Tik Tok where the girl stands up and then takes a nap under her desk? Complete with pillows, blankets, a squishmellow, a mini mattress and a shade to pull across the cubicle? Absolutely loved it and kinda wish i wasn’t so tall so I could fit under my desk. Her space looked so cozy and closed off to other people.

  69. Daisy Fox*

    I’m in the process of designing our new office and I’ve added a room that I’ve called “multi-purpose”. I’m talking it up saying it’s for pumping, praying and an additional meeting space but it’s not an accident that I’ve ordered wing back chairs for it and will be adding an internal lock.

    Normalise napping!

  70. Laura*

    I’m jealous of everyone who can take a quick nap and wake up feeling refreshed! I remember taking afternoon naps in the quad in college when I had a break between classes that was too short to get anything useful done (would just find a nice spot of grass and snooze). Now if I can’t nap for at least an hour I wake up groggier and feeling worse than if I had just pushed through.

    2. Csethiro Ceredin*

      Me too, and I’ve always been sad about it. I can’t sleep before midnight so it sure would help to be able to nap effectively.

      1. Galloping Gargoyles*

        I can totally relate to this. Even though I have a job with an early start. (I consider anything before 9:00 an early start but my day starts even earlier than that.) It’s hard when our natural sleep rhythms and our every day life don’t line up nicely.

    3. TechWorker*

      Yea me too, plus it takes me (what feels like I don’t time it..) ~20min to fall asleep usually so ‘a quick 20min power nap’ doesn’t really cut it

    4. Magc*

      This was me when my kids were babies. Everyone would say “Just nap when the baby naps!” but in reality it would take as much time as I’d spent napping to feel _only_ as bad as I had before the nap.

      If I can fall asleep during the day, either I’m dealing with sleep issues (more of thing now that I’m older) or I’m coming down with something.

      1. Laura*

        Yup, the baby stage was the worst for me because of the sleep deprivation. I can count the number of times I successfully “napped when the baby napped” on one hand. Though perhaps it’s genetic as neither of my kids was a very good napper!

    5. Also Laura Actually!*

      I can’t take short naps, either. It takes me 45 minutes just to fall asleep. My brother in law is army and can literally sleep standing up. He can just shut his brain off. I’m incredibly jealous of this skill.

      1. allathian*

        My husband falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow. I take at least 30 minutes at night, although if I’m tired enough to want a nap, I fall asleep more quickly. But his ability meant that when our son was a baby, I slept in one room and my husband and baby in another. He always brought the baby to me to nurse, or fed him from a bottle, even when he was working and I was on maternity leave. That first year was exhausting and I barely remember any of it.

        Kudos to all of you American parents with little or no maternity leave, I admire your resilience. Of course, when there are no good alternatives you do what you must, but I’m so glad I didn’t have to return to work after a few months off…

  71. Liz*

    Years ago I was training for a marathon and getting up very early in the morning to do so. I was exhausted at work, so a good friend/coworker would tell me when her executive-level boss would be out of the building and I’d nap on his office floor with the door closed. In retrospect it was pretty risky but we were young and dumb and I never got caught.

  72. ZSD*

    I love how many of these comments are, “Napping at work is and should be completely normal, and workplaces should have rooms and furniture that accommodate that,” rather than, “Any time anyone naps at work, it is mortifying.”

  73. Percysowner*

    I worked for a small nonprofit/government library. We had a break room with 2 recliners. We also had a one hour paid lunch. Staff divvied up lunches so that everyone could eat and then get a quick nap before going back to work. It was heaven.

  74. Trying Out a New Username*

    Years ago, we had a very elderly gentleman working in our office. He was often seen napping in his chair. When he was asleep, he often looked like a corpse. He also enjoyed listening to classical music at his desk. So imagine the thoughts that ran through our heads when we noticed him napping while Chopin’s Funeral March was playing in the background.

  75. Justin*

    Napping just disorients me so I take walks to recharge.

    I support anyone doing so if they’re still getting their stuff done and am glad to work at a place that treats us like adults and truly wouldn’t care if I napped so long as I didn’t miss my tasks.

    In South Korea where I started my career, we had a napping room.

  76. Apollo Warbuks*

    In my much younger and way more foolish partying days I came in work with a massive hangover clocked in and crawled behind the racking the in the warehouse to sleep, I woke up and loads of empty cardboard on top of me, and was really confused but as it was lunch time I went and found some food, on the way out I saw my friend Russel who was like “hey sleeping beauty, glad you’re awake now” it turns out he’d seen me sleeping and covered my up so the boss didn’t see me

  77. Pop-up book from hell*

    My first job out of college I hadn’t adjusted my sleep schedule yet and would regularly take a nap in my car during the hour lunch break. A few years into that job another team hired a guy and he would regularly be caught nodding off at his desk. One time the person training him looked over and she had to wake him up – this was one-on-one, sitting next to each other training. His excuse was always just that he had stayed up too late. He didn’t last very long…

  78. Alan*

    From school not work, but one of my favorite and funniest memories was when I was at the back of a lecture having been up for 36 hours desperately trying to finish a homework assignment and I heard this thunk noise. I didn’t know what it was but then I heard it again. I looked around and it was this other guy in class sitting a couple people over. He would fall asleep, his head would hit the wall, and he would wake up, only to start the cycle again. Over and over. Freshman year. I think a bunch of us learned quickly not to leave homework to the day before.

    1. Azure Jane Lunatic*

      One of my college friends had a brutal schedule and would find himself dozing off in class. He was a good student and sat near the back for this reason, and usually it was no problem. Then one day he was in the seat next to the window, and hit the metal mini-blinds extremely loudly.

  79. all naps all the time*

    When I was working in the office I would sometimes print out a report or something, then close my door and take a little nap in my chair with the report in my hand. That way if someone knocked on my door, it would look like I had been deeply studying whatever was in my hand instead of napping. Now that I WFH I can just nap during my lunch break on the couch (for some reason couch naps are better than bed naps).

    1. allathian*

      I don’t want to sleep on my bed fully clothed and I certainly don’t want to undress for a nap, that’s why I always nap on the couch.

  80. Verity Kindle*

    I was an RA but with way more responsibility because I was the only staff member on site. I was paid part time, but basically expected to be on-call 24/7. And on more than one occasion, I was woken up by a tradesperson or contractor who hadn’t told us he was coming but needed access to the building at whatever ungodly hour it was, and I would valiantly try to look like I hadn’t just woken up. I would jerk awake whenever I heard a car outside my window for fear that I’d forgotten an appointment, or someone had forgotten to tell me about an appointment, or generally just that someone had decided my working hours should have started already.

    They weren’t fun times, but on the flip side I’m much better at setting boundaries after going through that experience?

  81. Anonforthis*

    We work on sensitive data sometimes and have curtains on our cubes we can pull to block the view of passersby. At least two guys have been caught pulling their curtains to nap on their desks. One guy put his feet up on the desk and tipped his chair back. Kicker– he didn’t pull the curtain all the way, and anyone walking by could see him!

  82. OklahomaMama*

    I’m currently the sole daytime employee in a sleep clinic
    …with six beds
    …that I cannot utilize
    life is unfair lol

  83. Caz*

    A member of my team at OldJob would go out to her car for a nap every day on her lunch break – we got an hour and she was never late back, this was treated as a delightful quirk by her colleagues. I was just jealous that she got on-site parking so could do that, I had to park 20 minutes’ walk away…!

  84. anonymous anteater*

    I used to work at this research institute where a senior scientist had been awarded a Nobel Prize in recent memory. So they created a named lecture, which itself was a big annual shindig with high profile speakers in the field and a nice reception that we youngins got excited about.
    Let’s say his name was John Smith. So for the annual John Smith Lecture, he would come, shake the guest speaker’s hand, sit in the very front row for the talk, and … fall asleep. Every single year.

  85. Czech Mate*

    I’m friends with an admin at a prestigious university. Friend is originally from a country with a strong afternoon nap culture. Her office has a large, rarely-used conference room with several desks laid end to end, so when she first started she’d lie across them and nap on her lunch breaks. Her initial 90-day performance review was stellar, but it ended with her manager telling her to stop sleeping on the desks; she hadn’t realized it, but students could see the conference room when they were standing in the reception area, and they were being routinely greeted by the sight of her sprawled out like a dead body.

  86. Minnie*

    Not every day, but we have 30-minute lunchtime “meditation” sessions where you grab a yoga map and lie down in large conference rooms. I treat it as naptime.

  87. IT But I Can't Fix Your Printer*

    We used to have boring department-wide (200+ people) meetings in a huge room with a balcony in the back. Sometimes snores would drift down from the balcony.

  88. PurlsOfWisdom*

    When I was pregnant with both of my children I was permanantly EXHAUSTED, especially during my first trimesters. With both I repurposed my lunch hours to nap. For my first, since it was pre Covid and we were in the office, this meant going down to my car in the garage and napping. With my second, I was full time working from home and just went to my bed.

    I let my manager know what I was doing and that if they called my cell direct I could come back to my desk at any time. There were no issues with this and it improved my experience and work performance at that time. The few times I was unable to get the nap in due to work load needs I suffered performance issues in the afternoon.

    Eternally grateful I had very understanding managers who encouraged me to take what time I needed, within reason.

  89. Meghan*

    I am a Sales Manager for a hotel and our GM wanted us to go on sales calls, which everyone in our area knows are pointless but we needed to show that we were doing them. So my boss and I went to a few places and then drove to her house for an hour+ nap, it was glorious.

  90. Another Kristin*

    I used to work at a place that had a “wellness room” that included an air mattress and a comfy armchair, so theoretically naps were not only allowed, but encouraged. Not a lot of people used it, though, not sure why

  91. Coffee Please*

    I’m pregnant now but not in the stage where I’m telling coworkers yet. I have seriously considered napping in the lactation room once or twice.

    1. PurlsOfWisdom*

      I repurposed my lunch hours to nap during my pregnancies. Never would have made it otherwise.

      1. Magc*

        During my first trimester, I learned to sleep sitting in one of the stalls in the women’s rest room (not on purpose). Sometimes I could snag a short nap with my head on my desk, but I was in CubeWorld so it wasn’t as quiet.

  92. Midwest Mikki*

    For the first 2/3 or so of my work life I often napped for 10 or 15 minutes of my lunch hour. For a long time I worked in a campus building that started it’s life as a nurse’s dormitory. The small cafeteria was in a beautiful room with gorgeous blue and white woodwork and near the fireplace were easy chairs. After eating if one of the chairs was free I’d nap for a few minutes.

    Later when I had an office of my own I’d shut the door for my brief nap. Eventually, I got to be high enough in the management hierarchy that if I was in my office I wouldn’t be left alone so I switched to going away from our building for lunch and instead of napping I’d read.

    As an introvert in an extroverted field I’m convinced those naps or reading breaks saved my sanity all those years.

  93. amen*

    This reminds me of some entertaining advice I once read that said if you get caught dozing, just say “amen” before you lift your head. :-D

  94. knitcrazybooknut*

    I read somewhere about the perfect micro-napping technique. You lay your head down on your desk, holding your keys in your hand under the desk comfortably. As soon as you’ve relaxed long enough that your keys drop on the floor, you’ve had exactly enough sleep to give you a burst of energy.

    I did this dozens of times at my old job. If you drink some caffeine right before you do this, it will give you an adrenaline rush just as you wake up from your nap, to great effect.

    Also, there is a Nap Ministry you can google.

  95. CherryBlossom*

    Reading through these, I’m so jealous of people who can nap for 15-20 minutes and feel refreshed. If I can’t lay down and knock out for an hour, I just end up feeling worse. I fully *could* sneak a 15 minute nap at my current job, it just wouldn’t do me any good. :(

  96. Abogado Avocado*

    My husband’s employer (a charitable foundation) has nap rooms that you can book for 15 minutes at a time. What heaven!

  97. Over Analyst*

    I have a new contractor on my team who likes to brag that he once told his former supervisor that if he’s asleep she shouldn’t wake him because he’ll be more productive after… He was a very junior employee. And apparently found this so matter of fact that he’s now bragging to me, his de facto supervisor.

    1. allathian*

      He probably is more productive after his naps, although I wouldn’t advise anyone to brag about them to a superior in an unsupportive environment.

  98. Bagel Chip*

    My first job out of college was a terrible fit for me; I was doing admin work for the dermatology department of a university hospital but the position only had enough work to fill a full-time job for a portion of the year. I came in during the slow season and had maybe two or three hours of work to do at the maximum during the day, and wasn’t allowed to read at my desk to fill time (which I now realize is pretty normal but at the time frustrated me a lot, because even when asking for more work there just wasn’t any).

    It was an uncomfortable environment in general, with the doctors often being rude and full of themselves, a lab worker from upstairs often lingering around my cubicle trying to ask me out, and a general atmosphere that made me feel like I really didn’t belong there. The environment and experience started to aggravate my already pretty bad depression and I constantly thought about leaving.

    I got an hour for lunch and would eat at one of a few tables outside the building, and eventually I started bringing down a little timer I found in my desk and sleeping with my head on my book or a sweater until it was five minutes before I had to go back to work. I realize now that it probably didn’t look great to do this every single day in full view of any coworkers who walked by but I was very young and very sad and didn’t think that part through. It did help me get through the day, but I barely managed it all the same. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I only lasted about four months there.

  100. Lucky_bee*

    I don’t take medication often, and one morning in my early 20s I felt a cold coming and stupidly took 50mg of Benadryl (!!) that I’d kept on hand for my dog at the time (vet told me to just buy OTC stuff). Lord knows what I was thinking.

    About 15 minutes into my 25 minute drive to work, I’m actually falling asleep at the wheel. I was on rural back roads with little to no shoulder. It felt too risky to pull over and attempt to nap (knew I’d be too paranoid, regardless of drowsy state) or more driving to turn around and head back home, so I basically held one eye open with my hand and gunned it the rest of the way in. I still felt awful after clocking in and checking email and nothing needed my immediate attention. So since I had a private office all the way in the back of the building’s technical library, I kept the light off, set a timer on my phone for 30 minutes, and crawled under my desk and fell asleep. I should make note I am NOT a normal napper, I almost never can shut my brain down quick enough to make use of a nap. But I did it – undetected – woke up still a little off, but feeling much better and no longer dangerously drowsy. One and only time with Benadryl.

    1. WOOLFAN*

      I’m so glad you got to work safely!

      I once mistakenly took a nyquil capsule instead of a dayquil at work. I did not have a job with a private office, or where there was a space I could use for napping. It basically took all my effort to not pass out at my desk, and I am sure I spent some time staring into space, blankly, probably half asleep and willing myself to not fall all the way.

      Another time I ended up running to a pharmacy during my lunch break to pick up some Benadryl because I had a terrible sinus headache that I knew from experience would be helped with antihistamines. And the pain was bad enough that it was worth the struggle I’d feel all afternoon to stay awake. And struggle I did, indeed. Both luckily and unluckily I had walked to work, which I often did, so I had to walk home while desperately drowsy, but didn’t have to make decisions about driving in that state. (I like to think that I would have made the smart decision and walked home, coming back later for the car.)

      I don’t know if I’m overly sensitive to the fatigue causing side effects of these meds, or what. I once had a boss basically think I was making up BS excuses when I told him that I planned to take off the afternoon because I was having an allergic reaction to a bug bite and wanted to take some Benadryl to reduce it. Which, as we can see above, isn’t really an ideal situation for me getting any work done. IDK if he didn’t believe Benadryl does that to people, or if he didn’t believe me about having reactions to bug bites that necessitate medications? My wrist was swollen to nearly twice its size. If I could turn off that reaction, I would! (So I could be a good little worker bee… )

      1. allathian*

        So far I’ve found one OTC antihistamine that both works and doesn’t make me drowsy.

  101. CowWhisperer*

    I kept a pillow and blanket in a box on the bookcase in my classroom. I would use them to take a nap at the end of a hard day during my planning period.

    I was a young science teacher teaching 4 preps with five classes in alternative education. By resting for 30 minutes from 2 -2:30, I could attack a lot of work much more effectively before going home around 5pm.

    When I went to grad school, I had a pillow and blanket under my desk in the shared office. I was 34, pregnant and needed a napping place during 16 hour days. Soon, other desks had napping nooks.

  102. Warrior Princess Xena*

    Every now and then some combo of sleep patterns and lunch food that I haven’t identified will leave me in a state where I cannot stop myself from nodding off. It rarely lasts more than 10-15 minutes, but when it happens if I can’t get up and walk to stave it off it’s almost inescapable.

    So of course I was on a teams call (cameras on) with st least two people from the external client team, my manager, and my firm’s partner. And to my horror I found one of these napping spasms coming on. I managed to sort of keep my eyes open for the rest of the call by strength of will and the abysmal coffee in the conference room. No one called me out on it. I’m still not sure if that’s due to politeness or if I pulled it off.

  103. Sneaky Squirrel*

    I once had a job that shared the room with maybe 15-20 other colleagues doing the same work. The manager worked in the same room. No wall barriers shielding our work spaces from each other. One day, one of my colleagues crawled under their desk and decided to nap there. It was caught very quickly as one would expect when 15-20 people are there to witness.

  104. Makare*

    One day last week I was so dead exhausted from jet lag, plus a variety of other factors, that I literally could not keep my eyes open anymore. So I went into one of the (single occupancy) bathrooms, sat on the floor in the corner, and set a 10 minute timer to pass out. I literally live a 10 minute walk from my office and my coworkers would have told me to go home in an instant if they had known, but I just couldn’t even handle the idea of leaving the building, I was so tired! (And that 10 minutes got me through the rest of the afternoon)

    1. BubbleTea*

      There are a lot of medical conditions that can cause daytime drowsiness, but also yes, most people are chronically sleep deprived. Humans are not meant to be awake and active for 18 hours a day, the societal schedule and artifical light have messed up everyone’s sleep cycle.

      1. BubbleTea*

        Plus, we’re biologically inclined towards having a rest after eating. Napping after lunch helps digestion, and the redirection of blood flow to the digestive system means we’re less able to focus anyway.

  106. Name (Required)*

    Before I had my incredibly huge tonsils removed at age 26 or so, I had problems with them obstructing my airway at night which meant I woke up all the time and was constantly tired during the day (to the point where I had fallen asleep a few times driving). I would go to the bathroom and sit on the toilet and sleep for 15 to 20 minutes a couple of times a day. The stalls were small and I could lean against the wall and look like I was doing what people do in the bathroom.

    I was constantly exhausted until I finally got my doctor to refer me to an ENT. My dental hygienist told me I had the biggest tonsils she had ever seen.

    It is HARD having your tonsils out as an adult!!! But I went almost 5 years after without so much as a cold.

  107. DisneyChannelThis*

    This thread is wild to me! I’ve never once worked in a place where it was acceptable to nap at work. Even on your breaks. And I’ve worked in a couple different industries.

    1. Rosyglasses*

      I don’t know that this thread is so much about acceptability but more – has it happened? We all have silly thing that we have done when we look back we think – oh my, why?

    2. TechWorker*

      I mean I guess all the people who’ve never napped at work have less good napping stories :p

    3. I Have RBF*

      IMO, you are missing out on a great productivity booster. I’m a knowledge worker, and my afternoon siesta helps me think and solve problems. YMMV, of course.

  108. Sled dog mama*

    I am so jealous of all people who work where the occasional (or every day!) nap is ok.
    I was diagnosed with pneumonia earlier this week and I’m absolutely wiped just working half days (long story, small company, of course I’d get sick the week that we are short staffed so I’m on “no more than a half day and only critical tasks” duty until someone returns next week.

  109. Jeff of all trades*

    I once had a nap in the back of our Parks and Rec work truck while the rest of my crew took lunch.

    Our water truck driver noticed me, and he decided to give me a wakeup call, with a firehose.

  110. Roo*

    I used to work as an examinations officer at a posh private school. Exam time was very intense and I could be working sometimes until 10pm. I had my own office, so sometimes I would lock the door and use my lunch break to sleep under my desk with my academic gown rolled up as a pillow and an alarm set for the end of my break. The school porters used to deliver exam papers to my office, which obviously had to be kept locked and secure.

    One day, I had obviously been so far gone that I didn’t hear them unlock the door, place the boxes of exam papers in my office and quietly depart. The next day, there was a lovely bar of chocolate on my desk, with a note saying “a gift for Sleeping Beauty”.

    I was teased for ages afterwards. I left that job in the end – it was deeply toxic (“We aren’t going to promote you – and we advise you not to explore the reasons why.” “Is it because I’m a woman?” “Basically, yes.”) for many reasons, but the porters weren’t one of them. They were lovely.

  111. Rae*

    When I was young and had no concept of office norms I would nap in my car during my lunch hour. I fell asleep hard and slept through my alarm one day though and was gone for 3 hours. I think my pride was wounded that no on my team had noticed, but they did get a good laugh when I told them.

  112. Over It*

    Even though we returned to office a long time ago, we kept our monthly all staff meetings virtual for a long time because we didn’t want to cause a superspreader event by having 300+ people in the same room. Every month without fail, my coworker in the cube next to me would fall asleep during this meeting. In his defense, they are pretty boring. We finally returned to in person all staff meetings last year, so I make fun of him each month for losing his nap time! But at least he stays awake in person.

  113. Not a Good Look*

    So a couple of years ago, I was going thru some health stuff (actually still going thru it but it is much, much, much better). I had a lot of trouble sleeping at night so I was very sleep deprived and tired during the day.

    My job included some very tedious and mind-numbingly boring computer work and I sat in a cubicle (not a private office) right by the front door! Yes, I did nod off several times at my desk. But I know it was never for very long (30 sec-1 min at a time).

    I felt horrible and terribly guilty about it but the worst was the coworker who sat in the cubicle next to mine. She would scold me about letting her know if I was going to take a nap and tell me the story of how a friend once quietly **died** while sitting next to her and she thought they just fallen asleep.

  114. Swiss Army Them*

    When I was pregnant, I worked in a teeny-tiny office in a big medical building with a few coworkers. Before I got hired, these coworkers had decided they liked to keep the overhead lights off and just get by with floor lamps and desk lamps. This was all well and good, but between the 3pm sleepies, my pregnancy anemia, and the fact that my baby liked to tap-dance on my spine in the middle of the night, I took many short sitting-up naps in my chair. My boss definitely noticed, but I got all my work done and then some each day, so she never said a thing.

  115. Blue Spoon*

    My first job was at a museum that was a popular field trip destination, so it was often slam-packed busy in the mornings and dead quiet in the afternoons. During one of these quiet afternoons, I was cleaning the women’s bathroom (always a mighty task, but that day we’d had a mere dozens instead of hundreds of 4th graders so it was relatively surmountable). I had stayed up late the night before working on a paper and was dead tired, so I decided to sit down on one of the toilets for a moment…

    Only to be woken up about 20 minutes later by one of my coworkers coming in to check to see why I was taking so long cleaning the bathroom. Apparently they would have come in to check in on me sooner, but all the other staff on hand were male, so they’d had to wait for a female manager to come back from lunch (which makes me very glad that I wasn’t incapacitated in any harmful way). Fortunately that manager was very chill and I hadn’t been urgently needed during my impromptu naptime, so all that happened was it became a running joke for a while.

    1. Cedrus Libani*

      I used to take toilet naps. Then someone reported an unconscious person in the bathroom, and I found myself unceremoniously yanked out of the stall by my feet while a crowd of concerned onlookers watched…

      I found less public venues after that.

      1. allathian*

        I’m glad that here even multi-stall bathrooms generally have doors that reach the floor. Most have a gap of about an inch or so at the bottom, there are no thresholds to make cleaning the stalls easier. But yeah, I’ve sometimes been so tired at the office that I’ve fallen asleep sitting on the toilet seat…

  116. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

    When I was a college student living off-campus, my senior year I worked in a library until close at 2am 4 nights a week, which meant I usually didn’t get into bed until 3am. I also had full days of classes that started at 9am, and 2 other off-campus jobs.

    Needless to say, I desperately needed naps. I couldn’t get them at work and felt weird trying to nap in the library even if I was off-shift, but I did find a random room just off of one of the women’s bathrooms in the liberal arts building that had a couch and a chair in it. I’d never noticed the door to the room before in the years I’d been in that building, but it was always unoccupied during the 2 hour window I had between classes. It was like the Room of Requirement from Harry Potter, showing up because I needed a quiet place to nap. I would prop the chair up against the door in case anyone tried to come in, but it was never a problem. I got the best naps in that room. I actually told my younger cousin about it when she ended up going to the same college, but AFAIK, she never found it.

    1. WOOLFAN*

      Spontaneous library naps in college were the BEST naps! There were conspiracy theories about the air in the library making people drowsy, but obviously quiet academic libraries with abundant couches are going to make sleep deprived college students nod off. I even managed it a couple of times sitting upright in a wooden chair in a study carrell. One of those times when I woke up my circulation had be cut off so badly that my legs were just completely numb, and then intensely painful in the early stages of pins and needles. (And I had to pee so badly I worried that I was going to wet myself, yet had to wait until I could feel my legs before getting to the bathroom. I wonder how sleep deprived I had to have been to have napped that *hard*.)

      1. Gumby*

        I still miss the squishy oversize armchairs in Green Library. It was well known that they were the best spots to nap on campus.

  117. LovelyTresses*

    Oh I’m so embarrassed to share this story, but here goes. 20 years ago, during college, I interned in the legal department at the corporate offices of a very large, international big name bank. The head of the legal department was traveling for the summer with her husband, so I only overlapped with her for two weeks at the beginning of the summer and then the rest of the summer, her big, fancy office was not being used. I decided it was totally appropriate to bring in a small fleece blanket and sleep UNDER Big Bosses desk during my lunch break every day. I never announced that I was doing this, but I also didn’t try to hide it. To this day, I don’t know if the other (very smart, professional) lawyers knew what I was doing, but no one ever said anything. In addition to the napping being unprofessional, I shouldn’t have been entering a lawyer’s office without their permission on a daily basis. Today, I’m a local public figure and I still wince thinking about BigBank lawyers seeing me in the news and thinking “wasn’t she was that the intern that napped under Bosses desk every day?”

  118. H.Regalis*

    I have hypersomnia, and one of the great things about working remotely is that I can take a nap if I need to. My meds work pretty well so I don’t need to do it often, but there are of course days when the meds aren’t cutting it and being able to take a 30-minute nap break helps so much.

    Years ago at one of my previous jobs, the staff bathroom on the second floor was weirdly gigantic. It was bigger than some studio apartments and it had a separate room inside of it, away from the toilets and the sinks (both of which also had their own room), where there was a twin-size folding bed with a pillow and bed linens. You could shut the door and take a nap.

  119. Suzzee*

    I myself have napped in my car at lunchtime. I know of coworkers who have as well. At my last employer we would all laugh because around 2 o’clock a lot of people would need coffee. Having an official nap time and designated nap area at work would be heaven.

    1. allathian*

      I’m in Finland, and the 9 am and 2 pm coffee breaks are practically an institution here. Any employer who tried to take those away would start hemorrhaging employees. I work for the government and those two breaks are actually in our collective agreement.

  120. Anon because….*

    Once, more than a decade ago, I fell asleep waiting on a piece of software to open. The software was very old and obsolete at the time and needed to connect to a database housed in another state so it was quite slow.
    I clicked to open and woke to a completely open software. Worst part was that I happened to be working alongside a very well known senior person in my field that day, he apparently held this against me for years because he thought I had fallen asleep on purpose.

    1. Jeff of all trades*

      I used to have to do overnight server upgrades on office phone systems. Remote, thankfully. The servers were generally pretty under-powered so it would be hours of watching a progress bar that didn’t actually indicate total progress, just that something was still happening. I got to the point were I could set a timer, grab a nap, wake up briefly to click ‘Ok’ on a dialogue box to continue the upgrade, then nap again, repeat until complete. Not actually bad work, if you can get it!

  121. christine j*

    I’ve always found I tend to feel drowsy after lunch, back to my first professional-ish job at age 22. Back then, I would sometimes take a quick power nap on a sofa in a common area, which I now realize was naive and not a good look. At a later job I had a private office, would close the door to eat lunch and lie down for 15 minutes after. It made a huge difference in my energy and focus after.

    Since the beginning of COVID I’ve worked from home, which has actually been great for my productivity because I CAN nap freely when I need to. I only really need it a couple times a week, but when the options are being drowsy and unfocused while struggling to work for an hour, or napping for 15 minutes and then being alert and well rested, option 2 is obviously the better option for both me and my employer. I hate that there’s so much stigma around napping during the work day! I was lucky to work from home through both my pregnancies, and that ability to nap (and move my body into weird positions while working) made a huge difference in my ability to work at full capacity until my due date.

  122. Our Business Is Rejoicing*

    I remember one meeting many years ago where I was along primarily as a fly on the wall. I had a cold (pre-COVID days, of course) and was using cough syrup that made me a bit drowsy. I hadn’t even realized that at a couple of points where I closed my eyes, I’d actually dozed off. I was mortified, but if I’d actually had something to do at the meeting I’d likely have been fine.

  123. Anonymous Napping Professor*

    I am a dedicated napper at work. I teach college, so if it isn’t time when I have office hours or a meeting (or a class, of course), I don’t see why I shouldn’t. I have some sleep issues, and a little nap helps immensely. Shut the door, turn off the lights, throw down one blanket and cover up with another, use my bag as a pillow. Easy.

    Until we got a new dean who said we weren’t allowed to have blinds or anything to cover the windows in our offices (the narrow, long windows that are on the wall with our door that leads to the hallway, not our windows on the exterior wall). I was irritated at first. However, I figured out a way to continue my naps. By putting a coat on the back of one chair and putting the chair in the exact correct spot, I could lay under my desk and be completely unsee by anyone outside my office.

    (In about a decade of work, this has all gone smoothly except for the time I scared the hell put of the IT guy who let himself in my office to swap out some equipment. Oops.)

  124. HavenMiss*

    I had to train a guy once who came in for the training, and said he was very tired and wanted to start with a nap. We had a tight schedule, and the company has a very strict policy that allows them to fire you if you sleep on the job, full stop. I was so flabbergasted I suggested he stand up for the presentation or go make himself a cup of coffee. He gave pushback to those suggestions. In hindsight, I probably should have just reported it straight away since he was a jerk who needed two days instead of the standard one for the training, he couldn’t take feedback from a younger woman despite clearly not doing well, and I didn’t pass him (management pushed it through despite my long email saying why he wasn’t qualified and why I wouldn’t be signing him off).

    1. WellRed*

      I’m curious that the company needed to have a strict policy on this in the first place.

      1. HavenMiss*

        It was front-line hospitality, mostly hourly unionized, with a huge third-shift crew; the site easily has 70,000 employees across almost every type of work imaginable. The sleeping on the clock was one of dozens of rules of things you can’t do on the clock. I don’t know how common it was for other areas, but that rule went straight to termination instead of the usual line about disciplinary measures up to and including termination.

  125. So they all cheap-ass rolled over and one fell out*

    At my first job our of college, I had a private office (they were all the rage back then) and brought in a comfy armchair which I used for napping. When I was terminated for poor performance, the chair wouldn’t fit in the company-issued belongings box, so I left it behind.

  126. Aggretsuko*

    I was told that a coworker of mine many years ago had a napping space under the desk, with pillow, blankie, actual blankie attached under the desk. I’m flabbergasted this was allowed because good lord, this would not have flown while I was there.

  127. Radioactive Cyborg Llama*

    OK, when I was young, like 2 years out of law school, I pulled an all-nighter at the office and slept under my desk for maybe 1-2 hours rather than go home. I borrowed my office-neighbor’s cushion that he used for his back and drooled on it! To cover up my crime, I refused to give him back his back pillow until the drool had dried (and he asked more than once :facepalm:).

  128. Lucky*

    We had an (unpaid, high school, which helps) intern at our office last fall who fell asleep in the afternoons regularly – and our boss was surprisingly cool about it, would let them sleep for a bit if she saw them doing so.

    Helped that the intern was generally astute and keen on our line of work, they were the appropriate amount of embarrassed about it, and our boss certainly had no one to answer to.

  129. Csethiro Ceredin*

    We had a junior staff member who we found curled up asleep under her desk – not on a break. When we asked what was going on she looked baffled and said “I was out late??”

    I fainted at work once in my 30s (I had a slowly leaking appendix and couldn’t get a doctor to believe me that something was wrong, and after 2 months I developed a fever and got woozy) and was slumped over my desk. Apparently several people saw me and concluded I was napping and very kindly left me alone.

  130. Lemongrass Gogulope*

    For about a month I was getting migraines every day and towards the end it was too hot to continue napping in my car during my lunch break so I took my coworker up on her offer to nap under her desk while she was away (I worked the front desk and did not have any privacy). Unfortunately she also shared the office with the CEO who only used it when he was infrequently in town but of course as soon as I laid down I heard his voice outside the door. Luckily he never came in but I got out of there as soon as the coast was clear. And ended up in the hospital because it turns out migraines everyday are not normal. I do fervently wish my current job had a comfortable resting location. I’d appreciate just being able to stretch out and read a book on my lunch break.

  131. Snoozin Susan*

    Oooh I have an embarrassing one.

    My previous job had a couch in the break area. This break area was at the back of an open-plan office. If you needed a few moments of shut-eye, it was both accepted and common for people to take a power nap on the couch.

    One lunchtime, I was absolutely exhausted. I hadn’t really slept the night before and I’d been staring at my inbox for way too long. So during lunch, I figured I’d take a short nap and then eat my food.

    I woke up about an hour later. That was alright – I had an hour for lunch, so I figured I’d just eat at my desk. As I was heading back to my desk, one of my coworkers approaches me with a shit-eating grin.

    “Did you have a good sleep?”

    “Yeah… why are you smiling like that?”

    She laughed. “It sure sounded like one!”

    Aaaaand that’s how I found out that I snore like a chainsaw.

    On the bright side, this incident prompted me to get a sleep apnea test done, and surprise surprise, I have it. The CPAP machine has helped immensely and I recommend that anyone who’s not sleeping well at night gets tested!

  132. Anon For This*

    I don’t nap at work but I do love a webinar because it’s the perfect time for me to keep my eyes shut for an hour and just listen.

    My main story is related to a gentleman who used to hold my position as a solo librarian at a small academic institution. This guy used to keep a big fluffy pillow under his desk which was located in the middle of the library. In the afternoon, he’d whip it out and fall asleep right on the desk even if there were students in the library.

    He also kept a picture of a fake fiancee on his desk to ‘prevent students from hitting on him.’ From what I’m told, this was a solution for something unlikely to ever be a problem.

    This was one of my first jobs and I had major imposter syndrome until I learned what that person got away with for over a year. I might not have been the best librarian off the bat but I knew I could improve upon him.

    2. Snoozin Susan*

      As a former uni student, I can confidently say that hitting on the librarians never once occurred to me

      1. allathian*

        Nor to me. Of course, they were all very frendly and helpful regardless of gender, but they were also old. Well, old enough to be my parents at least.

  133. Meriadoc Tyler Moore*

    At my first job, which was an apprenticeship program at a media company, we had a monthly rotation. So, every three months, I would be on a team that REFUSED to give apprentices any work. Since this was a media company, we had private suites for phone/Zoom interviews. They weren’t soundproof but the doors were fully opaque, and you would usually determine if someone was in a “phone room” by listening at the door.

    So! I would go in, pull up a recording of an old interview on my phone, play an “office keyboard typing ASMR” video on YouTube, and take a nap. Anyone who came to listen at the door would hear me asking questions and typing, with the interviewee on speaker. Worked like a charm.

  134. Lizzay*

    The summer before my senior year in college, I interned at an office job & during a lull (nothing entry level enough to give me), they had me learn how to use this special calculator that everyone used (very fancy & yes, it worked differently than your standard math-class calculator, so the instruction manual was very useful). I started reading it, then leaned against my arm and dozed off. Awoke to the big boss (who was kind of terrifying) in the office asking if I was ok. Mortified!

    1. I Have RBF*

      I’ve had that happen. My response “Documentation so dry it literally put me to sleep!” There have been an astounding number of “Been there, done that.” responses. Some manuals are downright soporific.

  135. jmc*

    I used to get super sleepy and nod off at work years ago before I got diagnosed with sleep apnea and got a cpap machine. Now I do much better unless I’m super sick. Like now I slept more because I am recovering from covid, cause you know we are still in the pandemic. But I also have a lot of flexibility which is very helpful.

    1. allathian*

      We’re no longer in the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean Covid’s gone away. It’s become endemic, like the flu, so it’s never going to go away.

  136. Mike D*

    In the old days (we were in college), it took a long time for our stuff to ‘build’ (SW developers, early 90s). As a result of that experience, a friend of mine to this very day will sometimes reflexively shout “I’m compiling!” when somebody wakes him up.

  137. Rosey*

    I got fired from a job I loved because I fell asleep on my unpaid lunch break. Can’t have been more than 20 min. No warning, no PIP, just fired. I had zero recourse because I’d only worked there for 6 weeks. One of the most humiliating and devastating experiences of my life.

    So I’m just saying, be careful.

    1. I Have RBF*

      I think that’s asinine. Your lunch break is unpaid, so it’s your time, not theirs. Whether you go for a jog or a nap, as long as you are back on time and ready to work, they should have no say.

  138. Everything Bagel*

    When I worked in an office building, I used to occasionally go out to my car at lunch time and take a nap. I’d go park under a shady tree in the lot at our complex and snooze. I’ve seen other people do the same there. Anecdotally, sometime after I stopped smoking and started trying to eat less carb-heavy breakfast and lunch, I realized I didn’t really feel the need for naps in the middle of the day much after that.

  139. Flour Napper*

    As a college student, for a couple of years I had a part-time on campus job in the warehouse that supplied all the cafeterias. My start time was 4:00 AM, and you can imagine how hard that was when I had five roommates who did not need to get up early. At some point during my time on that job, for about 2-3 months, I would get to work so exhausted that I could barely keep my eyes open. It wasn’t hard to prepare everything that was needed, and I was usually done at least a half hour before anyone else arrived. So, I would go to the back of the warehouse where the 50 lb. sacks of flour were stacked, crawl up on top (six feet up) and into the back and take a nap.

    Fortunately, I was a light sleeper, and my watch alarm was enough to wake me up. I was never surprised by anyone, and was always able to keep on top of my work. The naps didn’t seem to help as much as I hoped, though, and I found out why a few months later. I had to go to our health center for some reason I don’t remember and they did a blood test. When the doctor came to see me, she said “did you know you had mono recently?” I was over it by then, but it sure explained a lot!

  140. Head Sheep Counter*

    Two things are wild to me on this thread… first… how many folk have terrible sleep patterns/issues (I do hope that if one is frequently drowsy that one also mentions this to their doctor).

    And how many people feel that sleeping at work is normal and desirable (I… can’t imagine laying my head on a communal couch… or setting up a sleep station under my desk). I can imagine needing the occasional refresher when working deadlines and what not… but frequent? So interesting.

    1. WellRed*

      I’m having trouble relating to this thread. I don’t sleep well in general and the rare times I’ve ever managed a nap (at home) Ive awoken disoriented and completely groggy.

      1. Ancient Llama*

        Unfortunate that naps don’t work for everyone, but research has shown an approximately 20 or 40 minute (not really in between as 20 minute increments are about the length of REM cycles) nap is very refreshing for most people. Albert Einstein was a proponent. I saw a few in here that did shorter naps and woke refresh, which I found odd but again people are a spectrum. So sounds like it doesn’t work for some at all, but for most it does wonders.

    2. Audrey Puffins*

      Unfortunately an awful lot of jobs are designed around “these are the hours when we want the work to happen” rather than “these are the hours when you have awoken naturally and are at your personal strongest”, so having a job is often not very conducive to maximising one’s natural sleep cycle

      1. Jeff of all trades*

        100% this. Optics and professionalism matter, which is why us nappers try to be discrete about it, but at the end of the day (and depending on the job), isn’t it the outcomes that matter most?

    3. Head Sheep Counter*

      I… am surprised also about the alternate work times folk want to accommodate their sleep. But that is a reflection of my having quite the opposite challenge – in that I like to come in early and leave at an earlier time. This works for construction jobs and for jobs that have folk in other timezones… but really didn’t work with jobs that barely had folk showing up at 9 let alone any earlier.

      I remain fascinated how work has changed from when I started working in offices to now. Its a lot and I’m curious to see what the future of “normal” is.

      1. allathian*

        I’m an early bird. I generally wake up reasonably well rested before my alarm goes off at 6, although a sunrise lamp and blackout curtais also help. If I WFH, I’m generally at my desk by 7, sometimes earlier but never later than 8. I’m generally at the office by 7.30. I generally take lunch at 11-12. Unless I’m swamped or have a late meeting, I generally stop working by 3.30. If I’m on a tight deadline I can push through later than that running on adrenaline, but I’ll pay for it in lower productivity later.

        I’m lucky in that we have lots of flexibility in setting our working hours as long as the work gets done and we attend the meetings we’ve agreed to attend.

  141. Knap noises*

    So many! I worked at a BigBox store where returned furniture was put to use in the employee lounge. If I had even 2 minutes at the end of lunch to lie down it made such a big difference!
    When my job was to take notes during dental exams, I would close just the one eye away from the practitioner’s line of sight when he started getting too chatty. Even that was a bit restful.
    I was very jet-lagged at the national meeting for a niche non-profit (a group that felt more like a family reunion among very liberally minded folks), so I cheerfully announced as we broke for lunch that I had slept with everyone in the room. Place a comma correctly and it was both completely true and completely innocuous.

  142. Rosyglasses*

    I was in my senior year of college and doing both a teaching practicum, going to class, working some days but mostly overnight shifts front desk at a hotel, and dating someone in a city 40 miles away. Often on those weekend overnight shifts I would get off work at 7am, drive to my boyfriend’s house, sleep for a couple hours, hang out all day, and then drive back for my 11pm shift.

    One night after a regular schedule of weekday classes and driving all over tarnation, as you might expect, I fell asleep while studying in the back office at the hotel only to wake up to a late night check-in banging away at the bell on the counter. I felt terrible but also… not terrible because I was in that zoned out half-asleep blur. Looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t fall asleep more often and my over 40 year old body shudders at the thought of even a third of the schedule I put myself through back then!

  143. XC Coolness*

    I was working as a healthcare professional in a leadership role. A part of my portfolio was providing in house education to the folks. I had a colleague, who was odd at baseline, though super lovely and really good at their job. We all make a good income and would be considered of higher socioeconomic status. This colleague always slept during meetings and in-services, although they had this weird thing where, when there would be a pause in the presentation, they would nod and mumble agreement. It would always strike me as hilarious and I would struggle to not laugh when I would be presenting. It turns out that despite them being from a wealthy family, living with their parents while in their late 40’s, and having been working for over 20 years, they worked in the evenings at a fast food joint.

  144. Sleepy Hire*

    There is a story at my company of a new hire that fell asleep during training on her first day. During the training session, which was on camera, she sitting on her couch (this no one minds), set the laptop down on what I suspect was a coffee table, laid down, and fell asleep – all still in view of the camera. There were two other new hires on the call and the trainer kept trying to get her attention to no avail. The session wasn’t very long (at most 45 min) and interactive.

  145. Pixel*

    I was horribly sick at the beginning of March 2020, right before lockdown, and I suspect it was COVID. Ever since then I’ve needed a nap over lunch and a 15-20 minute downtime in the afternoon. Luckily I WFH and can manage this. The only real problem is that the cat (an extremely bossy tortie) feels that I should spend my entire afternoon in bed so she can sleep snuggled up next to me, so I invariably get yelled at when I get up from my lunch nap to go back to work.

  146. Rara Avis*

    This summer I was working mornings only, but hanging out in my classroom in the afternoon until my kid was done (to avoid extra driving and because we don’t have Ac at home.) I was also having trouble sleeping during a heatwave. On the day I finally decided to give in and lie down on my floor for a nap, they came around to check the smoke alarms..

  147. Cookingcutie*

    When I was pregnant (and also a sleep deprived new parent) I would very occasionally take a nap in my car at lunch. I would intentionally park away from other people and recline the seat back so that hopefully nobody saw me. But it was only on my lunch break and if I could just not make it through the day, I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t have a private office, but sleeping in the car was never super restful anyway.

    And when I was in my 20s working at a learning center, there were times where I came very, very close to falling asleep when children were practicing their reading to me

    1. Loredena*

      When I was taking education classes at college one of the mandatory volunteer positions was at a daycare I helped in the infant room which means in more than one occasion rocking a baby to sleep meant me dozing off as well!

  148. HB*

    This isn’t a very entertaining story, but it IS the best nap I’ve ever had in my life and I only just realized that technically it was at work.

    Many years ago my father bought a dive store because it was about to close down, and he didn’t want to lose access to the compressor. It also gave me and my brother a place to work during the summer (I was already a certified SCUBA Instructor so this was actually fairly legitimate even if it was a bit weird). One Saturday morning I took some students out for a check out dive, and afterwards drove back to the store to help my brother for the rest of the day. This was late July or early August and so the AC was on full blast, but I was still chilled from the dive and absolutely freezing. I decided to get back into my car – which was quite toasty (again, summer), and took a nap in the back seat.

    Y’all, when I tell you this was the best nap of all time, it is no joke. I have never fallen asleep that fast. I have never woken up that refreshed. This happened over 20 years ago and I still yearn for it.

  149. Alanna of Trebond*

    I used to work for a TV station that made an end-of-year highlight reel to watch as a staff at the annual holiday party. There was one engineer who was a frequent on-the-job napper, and one year our commercial production team (who also produced the highlight reel) recorded him literally snoring in his desk chair. The entire room burst into laughter when we were treated to this snoring footage in the end-of-year video.

  150. Michigander*

    I was pregnant in 2020 so working from home was a godsend. I used to take a nap on the couch with the dog at lunch and then just work from the couch for the rest of the afternoon.

  151. ChatGPT*

    OK, it was in college, but it was something to see it! About 75 students in a 250 person lecture hall for a physics lecture. A guy sitting off to the left, maybe 50 feet from the professor was noticeably asleep. Without a word, the prof threw his chalk at the napper and the chalk hit the back of the molded plywood seat and just exploded in a cloud of dust. The napper snorked awake quite suddenly and seemed to have no idea what had just happened. The rest of us were amazed at the professors aim and arm and were now extra attentive to boot.

  152. Take One For The Team*

    Our CEO and COO are very well known for long, droning meetings in overheated, dark board rooms. The meetings are torture. Everyone has nodded off in one of those meetings especially since they schedule them right after lunch when everyone is full and sleepy. What’s worse is most of what they cover isn’t important, they are the peak definition of this meeting could have been an email so nobody can pay attention.

    Our head of maintenance, Stanley, is a big gruff guy who has everyone has the utmost respect for. He sits in an armchair in farthest corner, leans back and almost immediately starts snoring. Loudly. Nobody says anything.

    One meeting last winter it was unbearable – they droned on and on. It was snowing outside, we’d all come back from lunch, and it was so dim and cozy you could tell everyone was struggling not to stay awake. Stanley was in the back, already sawing wood. The CEO was droning on and suddenly from a dark back corner someone ripped the loudest fart I’ve ever heard in my life. We all new it was the new IT kid who had fallen asleep and farted himself awake but Stanley, without missing a beat goes “Sorry folks, that was me.” And goes right back to sleep.

    Total legend.

  153. Mrs Whosit*

    I took a 20 minute nap at work last year, once, after work hours were over and before an evening social event at work. I still felt guilty about it, like I’d be in trouble if someone saw me! Made it both a terrible nap and a realization about myself as an employee.

  154. SarahKay*

    We had a very well fitted-out Mother’s room (pumping room) on my previous site but, being in a male-dominated industry in the UK, no nursing mothers to use it. A coffee machine was added and it became a general use room for people to grab a quick drink or sit quietly for a few minutes.

    If I had a mid-afternoon slump I’d take a ten minute power-nap in there in the comfy chair.

    I also happily shared this information with the wider site at a training we had to attend on Human Factors, which is all about the importance of ensuring the person doing the work is, as much as possible, on their best game. We work in an industry where a mistake by an engineer or operator can cost hundreds of lives, so we have to do this training every two years, including office staff like me.

    1. SarahKay*

      Oh, and the Mother’s room being installed is something I really like about my company, despite it not really being needed in the UK.

      Back in 2017-ish the US CEO insisted that every site, everywhere in the world, would have one, complete with fridge, sink, comfy chair, height-adjustable table, radio and lockable cupboards. I’d read enough AAM by then to know that this was, for all the US sites, a very *good thing*.

  155. Applesauced*

    My first job was as a page in the local public library – I put books back on the shelf.
    When it was slow (or I justed wanted a break from alphabetizing), I would hide deep in the stacks in the basement and read. I never napped, but now I think that was a wasted opportunity.

  156. Holly Berry*

    First, this post reminds me of George Costanza on “Seinfeld” (the sleeping in the office episode is classic). Second, I sometimes do yoga nidra and/or power naps on my lunch break. Nobody is around at that time of evening and I have the break room to myself. I don’t intend to fall asleep, but it happens sometimes.

    1. Jeff of all trades*

      I was the only younger person in a yoga class of mostly 60+ women. As we were doing shavasana, the end of our session was punctuated by a giant fart from one of the ladies who had dozed off.
      Namaste, Linda!

      1. Holly Berry*

        Oh, yes, I’ve been in the yoga fart situation! It happens more than you might think. LOL

  157. Prudence and Wakeen Snooter Theatre for the Performing Oats*

    I worked for a soda manufacturer and would go to the ingredient storage and nap on the 50 pound bags of sodium benzoate. Not the most comfortable, but it was a locked room with a noisy door.

  158. Llellayena*

    Every once in a while I’ll come into work still ridiculously tired. I just tell the nearest person “If you find me asleep, just note the time so I can put in for the PTO.” I will also nap at lunch when I work from home during a cold to boost my energy enough to get to the end of the day. Otherwise I fade HARD around 3:30 and have to leave work early.

  159. Seawren*

    I was asked to provide technical training on a new reporting system, which was a standard request, but the office manager insisted that EVERYBODY be included, including the hourly staff who worked in the warehouse and had no access to computers even if they wanted to use it. I had to schedule two sessions to accommodate everyone. The office manager attended both sessions, sat front row center, pulled his ball cap over his eyes and snored through both meetings.

  160. Sundance Kid*

    I worked as a college intern for PENNDot, the state department of transportation. Part of my job involved riding along to accident sites to document the road conditions (mercifully, after the accident had been cleared). My supervisor and a full time person would usually be up in front of the car, and I’d ride in the back.

    I. Could. Not. Stay. Awake. Nine times out of ten, I’d fall asleep in the back seat. In my defense, I had to report to work at 7am. My coworkers and supervisor were actually pretty great about it. I took some well-deserved ribbing, but never got in any meaningful trouble.

    To this day, if I’m in the back seat of a car, I have trouble staying awake.

    Side note: that’s the job where I learned the very hard way what the web address for Dicks Sporting Goods is not. I was very much wide awake when I emailed the IT department and my supervisor to frantically explain the wildly inappropriate browser pop ups that had taken over my monitor. (This was early 2000s when that was still a thing.)

    1. The OG Sleepless*

      Haha, one of my coworkers discovered the same thing. We had a whiteboard in our workspace where we left each other random notes, and one day there was one from him that said “hey gang, it turns out that the website for Dicks Sporting Goods is not D*cks dot com. Just thought y’all would like to know.”

    2. RetiedAcademicLibrarian*

      I remember when we had to warn students that whitehouse dot com was not a government web site and definitely NSFW (or school).

  161. Generic Name*

    Nap story 1: I had an internship at a factory. One of the processes was electroplating some gears or something along those lines. The electroplating vats were enormous 1,000-gallon open tubs filled with hot acid and dissolved metals, and I think either the water or the gears or both were electrically charged. When I had a tour on my first day, it was stressed to me how dangerous the stuff in the vats were. So dangerous that the vats sat over a large open pit so that if the vat failed or sprung a leak, the hot metal-acid solution would go into the pit below. Otherwise, the solution would flood the entire factory and kill everyone inside. Apparently, at various times, more than one factory worker was discovered to be in the habit of going down into the pit to take naps. That was when I realized that, unlike how I had been raised to believe that everyone was the same and everyone could achieve equal success if given the opportunity (bless my liberal parents), not everyone had the same level of intelligence.

    Nap story 2: Not as egregious, but I worked in a clinical lab one summer. The lab technologists had stereoscopic microscopes at their cubicle desks. One of the technologists apparently was on a PIP because she was caught napping at her desk. She didn’t just lean back in her chair or lay her head on her desk, though. She would sit at the microscope and would nap with her head (maybe closed eyes even??) resting on the eyepieces of her microscope in an effort to look like she was working when she actually was sleeping.

    1. JustaTech*

      On the list of “questionable places for a nap” I had a coworker who had been an officer on a US Navy nuclear submarine as a young man. He told us that, as the most junior nuclear officer, he had the worst shift, so he was often in want/need of a nap. So he found the perfect spot to sneak a nap while on shift: he would wiggle between the backs of the computer banks and the hull of the sub (!) and take a little snooze.

      I have since been on a US Navy sub and I know my coworker was a skinny guy but for the life of me I don’t understand how he got back there!

  162. Throwaway_For_Today*

    I once worked a journalism job on a 5:30am shift. I didn’t have a car at the time so I would take a 25-minute bus commute to work, which necessitated being out of bed at 4:15 to get out the door on time. Combine that with a night-owl body clock and a partner who ran a bar and it was an absolute nightmare schedule. Suffice to say I never ever felt good on the way to work for one reason or another.

    A few months before I quit I realized that, due to staffing cutbacks, nobody else was showing up until 7am at the absolute earliest, and we had a video production suite that was no longer staffed. It was, like many video production suites, soundproof, windowless and very, very dark when the lights were turned off. So once or twice a week on the absolute worst mornings I would log in, make sure nothing major had happened in the city or the world overnight, then bring a rolled-up sweatshirt into the video suite and take myself a nap, being sure to set an alarm for 6:45 just in case.

  163. ArtsyFartsy*

    When I was in college I had a summer job at a large performing arts venue as a driver. Basically a runner to shuttle any people and anything the artists might need that day. It did not pay particularly well, but did have great side benefits, like if there was nothing going on at that moment, napping on the couch in the lounge was very acceptable!

  164. MikeM_inMD*

    Years ago I was in a development program at a government agency. One of the requirements of the program was to do two weeks of shift work in one of the computer centers so that you would gain an appreciation for the work done overnight (or something like that). I did two weeks of “mids” (11 pm to 7 am). For the first six hours we were moderately busy with the routine chores, but it was rare for there to be anything to do during the last two hours. So, everyone found a comfy place – many arm chairs and sofas available – and dozed, napped, or read a book. Thankfully, no one was a snorer.

  165. Mouse named Anon*

    I worked at this strange company about 8-9 years ago. Everything was a big deal it seemed and there was no messing up, screwing around or excuse for poor service/work in their eyes. Pay was equally bad (i think I made like $14.00 an hour). Anyway, there was this one woman who was insufferable. She had poor manners, terrible hygiene, would say whatever off color phrase came to her mind (very NSFW, racist and homophobic). Many of which I called her out on. She was just all around strange.

    However, she was the only person at our company that could do a very important and very niche job. She basically got away with everything. She started falling asleep at her desk, sometimes would snore loudly. She had one friend that would wake her up. But she got tired of it and started going to get her boss to wake her. She was never reprimanded, for fear they would have to fire her or she’d quit. Later I learned she was working overnights at UPS to earn extra money. Which I did feel bad for, but she was such a terrible co-worker it was hard to find compassion.

  166. PurlsOfWisdom*

    I once had a coworker who fell asleep in the middle of an All Hands meeting. We were a relatively small company (~25 people in the room and ~20 or so on video from our other office). He was seated near several director level colleagues and they DEFINITELY noticed, pretty much everyone around the room did by the end. At one point I texted another coworker who was nearby and he poked him awake, but he fell asleep again shortly after.

    I will never forget the feeling of uselessness watching this unfold from across the room.

    It came out later that he was struggling with some substance use issues. He took some leave from work and got the help he needed, and I remember being grateful to a workplace that was understanding and supportive of his needs at a difficult time.

  167. Riggs*

    We had a new hire right out of college who I’d often catch falling asleep at his desk with his office door wide open. It was so bad that one time he actually fell asleep while I was sitting next to him talking to him! I suspect he was one of those gamer types who would stay up until 4am on his computer and then struggle to get through the day. Luckily things have improved in the past couple years, but sometimes when his office door is closed I still wonder if he’s just napping!

  168. Zephy*

    I have an office with a door that closes right now, so sometimes when I’m on my lunch break I’ll shut the door, turn off the lights, and just lie down on the floor for a few minutes. I don’t think I’ve ever fallen asleep but I set an alarm just in case. A previous job had a sofa in the break room that people would occasionally nap on.

    My husband is an x-ray tech and he’s admitted to napping, or at least laying down, in an unused exam room for a few minutes once or twice.

  169. Just Me*

    I work for a public accounting firm. During tax season, everyone works extra hours, but we have a lot of flexibility – we have core hours we are supposed to be there, and then you can come in early or leave late, whatever you need to do to get your work done.

    Several years ago, a manager popped her head in my office door one evening about 7:00. She asked if “Chad”, who had the office next to mine, was still there, or if he had left for the day. I said I hadn’t seen him since around six, and she said, “His light’s off, he probably went home. If you see him before I do in the morning, tell him I need to ask him something about a client and to come see me.” She went back to her office and her work. About 10:00 she went home. She walked through the office, noting all lights were out. She set the alarm, locked the door and left. A few hours later, one of the partners got woken up by a call from the alarm company. There was movement in the building. The partner met the cops there, and they found Chad… who had turned off his light and laid down on the floor behind his desk about 6:00 thinking he’d take a quick nap. He woke up eventually, and decided he’d make some coffee and then work an hour or so before going home to change for the next day. He never thought about the alarm being set. Until the cops came in. Poor Chad – it took years for him to live that one down.

  170. Nat20*

    My first semester as an adjunct instructor at a university, I was scheduled to teach four 50-minute classes on Monday/Wednesday/Friday: the first two were at 8 and 9am… the next at 4 and 5pm. That 6-hour gap was *brutal*. Afternoon naps at my desk were more frequent than I’d like to admit, but brief and usually unintentional. Usually.

    Obviously I could’ve gone home, but I also lived 30 minutes away from campus including a bus ride, and I didn’t want to add another hour+ of commute to the day just to come back to work anyway. So most of the time, I stayed on campus and generally kept myself busy. I also lucked out and actually had my own private office (unheard of for a first-time adjunct), so at least no one ever saw me zonked out on the desk.

    On the plus side, I pretty much never had take home any grading or lesson planning that semester, or really any work at all, cause I’d get it all done in that awful, sleepy gap.

  171. Absolutely anonymous*

    My husband used to teach for an educational cooperative that had special needs classes housed in various local school districts. He frequently had meetings with parents and other providers during the day, and the cooperative would hire substitutes to cover his room. Husband would be in an out of the class between meetings. One such day, his classroom aides pointed out that the sub was napping, with his head down on the teacher’s desk, and they had attempted to keep him awake several times. It so happened that the coop director was in the building, so he was summoned to deal with the situation. Director came in, woke the sub, gave him a “talking to”, then spoke to the staff at the back of the room.
    “ I think that should take care of the problem,” he said. The aides pointed him back toward the sub, who was already asleep again on the desk. The sub was escorted out, and removed from the sub list.

  172. SOOOoooooo anony right now*

    Bad Example: I was experiencing some not-mild depressive issues during my pregnancy and sought counseling, as one ought, but one of the “licensed” mental health counselors I attempted just could. not. stay. awake. during our sessions. I’m conflict avoidant when I’m not depressed so taking any kind of stand for myself was extra out of the question under those circumstances, so I kept making appointments hoping it would eventually turn around. At some point though, after they asked me to tell the same contextual story for the Nth time (because apparently they had been asleep the first N-# times I had relayed that context), I simply stopped making new appointments. I never heard back from them for a follow up. Good riddance and I hope they developed some better sleep hygiene or got their own help to resolve their napping problem.

  173. BeH*

    a friend of mine works at a community college (staff, not faculty) and regularly goes into an empty classroom to nap during lunch. I’ve asked what would happen if someone had a class scheduled during that time? but apparently it’s a risk he’s willing to take.

  174. Keladry of Midelan*

    When I was a college student, I spent a summer as an intern documenting all the fossilized spores on a single microscope slide in a sub basement. Needless to say, I got sleepy. Once in awhile, I rested my eyes on the microscope eye pieces (so it looked like I was looking through it) and let myself doze a little.

  175. IWentHojo*

    Not me, but a coworker from my automotive manufacturing days. He had been working on site at one of the assembly plants helping with a major quality issue, so long hours and little sleep. One of the guys in the warehouse noticed that he was barely functional, so warehouse guy offered to help him hide for a bit to get a nap. Warehouse guy uses a forklift to pull a pallet off the rack that has a bench seat on it, coworker lays down on the seat, and then warehouse guy puts the pallet back on the rack. Coworker slept there for an hour until the warehouse guy came back and got him down.

  176. Anonymous for this*

    This just happened last month!

    We were on a managers meeting where we normally are all in-person or on video. One of our new managers was muted with no video for the whole meeting which is uncommon but not entirely unheard of. Right as the meeting is wrapping up, their video suddenly came on and all we can see is their closed eye turned to the side. Like an up close shot of their eye like they’re laying down asleep. No one knows what to do so we all just pretend we didn’t see it. I just kept staring at my toes so I didn’t start giggling inappropriately at the disembodied eye.

    This goes on for maybe a minute or two, then the VP says there’s one last point of business and that next week is the napper’s last week with the company. They open the disturbingly close-up eye, sit up, stretch, all while telling us how great it was to work with us and how if there’s ever an opportunity to work together again, that’d be great!

    I don’t know if they ever figured out the video was on or not…

  177. Harrowhark*

    Once upon a time, I was a 20-something datacomm technician who was trying to find the right medication for depression. During one particularly bad trial, I could not keep my eyes open unless I was walking, doing something physical, or driving (and, hoo-boy, some days even that was dicey).

    I had been given the sole key to a fairly large spare parts room and ended up turning a hidden corner of it into a nap spot.

    A lot of electronic equipment comes packed with massive sheets of bubble wrap and sheets of air pillows. Layered correctly, they made a nice mattress.

    I used sheets of brown packing paper as a blanket and brought a small travel pillow from home to complete the setup.

    This was long enough ago that cellphones weren’t ubiquitous, so we all carried pagers. The office complex I worked in was huge and it was normal for me to not be anywhere near my boss and co-workers. Which meant I could curl up for short cat naps in the spare parts room, emerging whenever someone summoned me.

  178. Ally McBeal*

    I temped in an auxiliary office of one of the biggest/best-known magazine publishers. So, all the “glamour” (lol) of working at the fancy company, but without having to live in terror every day that I’d have to share an elevator with Miranda Priestly or the overall feeling of micro/mis-management at the main office. I was tasked with inventory for a big e-commerce campaign – sorting and tagging the inventory, packaging it to go out to buyers, etc. The empty room where we kept the inventory had huge southwest-facing windows, so while the rest of the office was freezing, that room got very cozy in the afternoons. My manager and I became very close (still friends to this day, 10+ years after we stopped working together) and we would occasionally hide in there to nap or gossip or do our nails. No one ever caught us. It was lovely.

  179. Christina*

    I hated my job at the time and refused to spend one more minute at my desk than I was being paid for. Most people ate at their desk or went out for lunch. No thank you on the first, and I was broke on the second, so I would go eat in my car parked a few blocks away. More often than not, I would also take a quick nap. I figured it’s far enough away that no one would really notice. When I finally quit, and had my going away lunch/drinks thing, one of my coworkers came up to me at the end and said “Why did you always go nap in your car?” Guess I wasn’t as inconspicuous as I thought.

    (Related, my boss, who I and everyone else except her best friend hated, took our team out for a holiday lunch, so I took an extra hour after that for my lunch break just to walk around and get some errands done. She told me later I couldn’t do that, team building time is my break time. In that case I’ll skip the team building and get my actual break.)

    1. Christina*

      This reminded me of another nap story from that job. One person on this team also despised this manager and she hated him just as much. One day he decided to take a full-on nap, including feet up on his desk, which was directly across from her office. But she was the worst so didn’t do anything about it other than just slamming her door – which was a sliding cubicle door so more funny to everyone else than actually effective.

  180. Monkey's Paw Manicure*

    With my current employer, I spent about eight and a half years on dialysis. Aside from feeling tired all the time from anemia, I went through periods of insomnia, so I often showed up at the office feeling like death warmed over.

    Happily, I have my own office and kept a sleeping bag and a camping sleeping mat there. When I’d realize I couldn’t brain so good, I’d lock my office door (the old fashioned kind without a peekaboo window), empty my pants pockets, use my office pullover fleece as a pillow, and set my alarm for 35 minutes. On bad days, I’d reset the alarm when it went off. Amazing how a 35/70-minute nap let me actually do good work for the rest of the day!

    I assume people knew, but no one ever mentioned it. During those years, I was promoted twice, so I guess the bosses didn’t mind.

  181. Cyndi*

    The only time I’ve fallen asleep AT work was at the first week of a job where IT had gone off the rails in some way, I never found out how, and I (and the 8 other people who started same day) didn’t get system access until our second week of work. We still had to show up every day for our full hours, though, and once I ran out my supply of library books there wasn’t much to do BUT nap.

    I also once got hit with a stomach bug in the middle of a workday–mercifully it was a WFH day, but I couldn’t actually clock out early, because my boss was out of contact, so there was nobody but me to take calls, and no way for me to let him know. So (in between trips to the bathroom) I spent most of that day asleep at my desk, with my headset on so phone calls would wake me up. Not the greatest day of my life!

  182. Hola! Donde esta la bibliotheca?*

    Language lab in high school. After lunch, south side of building, droning voice on the headphones. The teacher was always waking me up by cutting in over the droning voice to say she couldn’t hear me, speak up!

    Same thing at work. Droning voice, warm room, after lunch = nap time. Retired now. Still nap in the afternoon if it’s warm!

  183. Dr. Big Words*

    Many years ago when I was in my early twenties, I worked first shift weekends at an adult video store, which was predictably the slowest time of day for that business. Since I was invariably hungover (or still intoxicated) from partying the night before, it was extremely hard to stay awake. Fortunately, there was an extremely wide counter at the front of the store and a door chime, so I cleared out a spot on the shelf underneath where I could curl up and sleep until woken up by the chime. I perfected the art of waking just as door started to open, rolling out and landing in a crouched position, and popping up from behind the counter before a customer (or the owner) got all the way inside the door and I was detectable. Knew that a pillow would have been too suspicious, but I cultivated a reputation for always being cold and so always had some nice bulky sweaters on hand to use in its stead. Didn’t get caught the entire time I worked there (2+ years).

  184. Eeyore is my spirit animal*

    Fortunately, I am tucked in a corner behind a cubicle wall, so the visitors can’t see me. But co-workers have to walk in front of my desk to get to the printers.
    When I started back to work after chemo, everyone was very forgiving of me nodding off at my desk. I didn’t realize how bad it was until one day a co-worker carefully peeked around the wall and said “Oh, You’re awake!” totally surprised I wasn’t napping. I felt bad, but my body didn’t care.

  185. Sparkles McFadden*

    The “not me” story: I worked in a computer control room in the 80s when everything was very large (15 pound disk packs and such). Many major cables, both data and power, were bundled behind a very large piece of equipment. One day we lost connectivity for a data transmission system. While troubleshooting, our shift manager found an entire mini-bedroom set up which featured a metal-framed cot positioned right next to a breaker panel. Surprisingly, no one got fired, but management did send a memo around that essentially said not to take a nap in a way that might result in your death.

    The “me” story: I worked a full overnight shift but was asked to stay into the morning for a vendor presentation. The presenter lowered the lights and began speaking in a low monotone and I fell asleep. I woke up and tried not to panic because I figured it would be very obvious (and embarrassing) that I fell asleep. It wasn’t apparent to anyone because almost everyone around the table was asleep, and one guy started to snore. The presenter either didn’t notice any of this or was pretending very well in the hope of making a sale.

  186. Bean Counter Extraordinaire*

    This happened before my time here (I actually replaced this person), but allegedly this employee left the building for lunch, came back at the end of lunch, went to the bathroom a short while later, and fell asleep in the bathroom. Another bean counter’s office shared a wall with that particular bathroom and they could hear the occupant snoring.

    The employee had fallen asleep in their office on a couple other occasions previously.
    That was not WHY they no longer work here, but… it probably didn’t help.

  187. Twoflower*

    One of my best friends in high school used to fall asleep all the time in the silliest places–and it was usually harmless.
    However, we worked as lifeguards in the summer. And he did fall asleep in the chair.
    He got stuck with walking stands (where you pace back and forth along the edge of the pool holding an inner tube) and trash duty for the whole rest of the summer.
    Great guy.

  188. Pokemon Go To The Polls*

    I am lucky I work from home because sometimes you just really need to rest your eyes for 20-30 minutes and it’s much easier to do on your own sofa than in a cubicle.
    I used to work with a guy who would doze off and snore during meetings and I don’t think anybody said anything to him about it because he was a grandpa and that is a very grandpa thing to do.

  189. Tradd*

    I don’t know if this quite fits, but a place I worked at years ago had an older woman employee. She had been there for years. She was in my department and for a few months, every time I walked by her desk in transit to copier or printers she was asleep in her chair, head back, snoring. This happened multiple times a day. The problem is that she wasn’t getting work done and I had to do what she didn’t finish. I was given no choice in the matter. Management refused to do anything about it. I finally took matters into my own hands and started asking her if she was OK every time I walked by her desk and saw her sleeping. She stopped sleeping. I never knew why she was sleeping on the job, but she retired about a year later. I was not sorry to see her go.

  190. Lyn by the River*

    I was a manager of a small nonprofit and my policy director had a young child at home (ie, did not always sleep well at night). He asked if it was ok to take short naps after lunch under his cube desk. He was great at his job and I feel like everyone should get naps in the afternoon anyway, so i said yes. It was never a problem but we did get funny looks when colleagues would stop by and he would have to crawl out to speak with them.
    Allowing naps was one of my favorite parts of being a manager :)

  191. General von Klinkerhoffen*

    I was pregnant with my second before my first was weaned or sleeping through the night. Add a 3-hour daily commute and brutal morning sickness and you’ll understand that I wasn’t the most energetic pony in the stable.

    One morning, alighting at the city railway station, a fellow regular cheerfully congratulated me on having woken up before $PenultimateStop. I gave her a blank look and sort of growled, “I’m fifteen weeks pregnant and I get more sleep on the train than in my bed.”

    I am more gracious now I am well rested.

  192. CatMouse*

    I’ve definitely napped, intentionally and not, at work. When I worked at a theme park I would go to a small, lesser used workshop and nap there. When I worked at a call center I wouldn’t intend to nap, but there qould be a slow period and I would just start to doze in my chair the alerts for a call or chat would startle me awake, but since I didn’t miss any and my numbers were good, the higher ups didn’t care, and I certainly wasn’t the only one that would doze off!

  193. Martin*

    I was caring for and elderly relative and short on sleep. On my lunch hour I would use my master key and let myself into the foyer of the boardroom. It was on a separate, rarely used floor.

    I would sleep on the sofa in the foyer, covered with a tablecloth (a large dining room was attached – very fancy). This went on for a year. No one caught me.

  194. Anonforthis77*

    Worked with someone who claimed she’d learned to stay awake while looking like she was visibly asleep during her active duty time in the military. Head against the wall and eyes closed, every single meeting. She stopped using that excuse after a snoring bout, but still works there and still sleeps through every meeting. Did I mention we worked for the military as civilians? So glad I left.

  195. Immortal for a limited time*

    For whatever reason, I’m not a napper. Nap time in kindergarten was torture for me, and on the few occasions in my adult life when I’ve tried to take a nap, I might have succeeded only once, maybe twice (and I’m in my late 50s). But I don’t have children, and I totally understand and respect how dramatically that would have changed the “unable to nap” pattern that seems to have come preinstalled. There was one time I became so tired and stressed from a job change that I actually fell asleep on a plane when we left on vacation, and I slept, drug-like, through the worst turbulence my husband had ever experienced. That was magical. But napping at work? I can’t even imagine that. I wish I were able to!

    1. Mouse named Anon*

      Me too. Unless I am really sick or incredibly tired I cannot nap. Even when my kids were newborns I couldn’t nap.

  196. Ann no E in Texas*

    I am an attorney and once fell asleep during a docket call. Docket Calls are long lists of cases where the attorneys involved let the court know what’s going on with their case. Sometimes you can have only one case on a list of 50 and be in court for hours waiting to be heard. So, at the very beginning of my career, I had one case in front of this judge that was known to take hours on a docket call. The courtroom had these awesome highbacked leather seats in the jury box, so comfortable and the courtroom was always very chilly. It was the perfect setting for a nap. If the judge hadn’t been trying to conduct business.
    Anyway, one day I was sitting there waiting and waiting and next thing I know my eyes jerk open and the court coordinator, court reporter and some of the other lawyers are staring at me and grinning. I am not 100% sure but I think I awakened myself with a slight snore. Very embarrassing but the judge never mentioned it, so I am hoping he was oblivious.

  197. Justin D*

    I remember a letter from over a decade ago (maybe even 15 years?) where the LW couldn’t sleep the night before starting a new job (due to nerves) and then when given a quiet moment alone at their new desk on their first day…briefly nodded off and was immediately fired. I remember commenting that this was not a huge deal to fall asleep at work and shouldn’t have resulted in firing and being corrected by AAM and several other commenters that it was indeed a HUGE deal and definitely worthy of firing.

    Interesting to see how attitudes have changed.

  198. Keyboard Cowboy*

    I work at one of the Big Tech companies that is famous for having napping accomodations. They look different in different places; a weird spaceship-looking reclining chair in some places, but more recently, in offices in Europe I’ve seen an actual European twin-sized mattress, throw pillow, and throw blanket, with a curtain drawn across the area. That saved my life one jetlagged day when I thought I literally would fall over and start snoring in the middle of standup; 20 minutes (of being actually out!) and I was OK again.

    In my current office building in the west coast US, we don’t have any of the weird spaceship chairs. But when they decorated the building, they cut little cubbies into low-traffic parts of the hallway, with a curtain that only extends over half the cubby. Problem is: the cubbies are too short and curved to actually comfortably lie down in any position other than face-up, and the cubbies have dramatic lighting inside to make them look inviting from outside. The lighting does not turn off. So… most of us, when we need a nap, just stretch out on one of the regular couches in the lounge areas instead :)

  199. NCA*

    At my first job, before my medical issues were diagnosed and I had treatment to help, I was /constantly/ exhausted. My way of dealing with this as a fresh 22 year old was to take naps on my 15 min and 30 min breaks/lunch, at my desk, as there was nowhere to go and no real break room. Face down at the computer screen, sitting in the chair, nothing weird. One of my 5 bosses started getting more and more irked about this, but didn’t tell me until it came out explosively that he felt I was being unprofessional by napping. A mediator and a couple of the other bosses on the team sat down with us to talk things out – we agreed that, as we were expected to take our breaks/lunch at our desk if not smoking, and as I was not doing anything /wrong/ by napping, that I could continue napping on my breaks as long as I set up a clear sign that I was on break/lunch. (Nowadays I would have probably asked for ADA accommodations regarding it, but I’ve never encountered anyone else who was so vehemently anti napping during break)

  200. Sleepy Bee*

    I am not sure if my former coworker is an AAM reader so I’ll briefly tell her story. She went into a supply/printer room, closed the door and started taking what she intended to be a 10 minute nap. This was during Covid so very few people were in the office, if any, on any given day. She woke up five hours later. She is non exempt and her conscience got the best of her and she confessed to her boss who was very gracious and just let it go.

  201. MechE31*

    I’ve got 2.

    First is an older technician who worked in a lab. He was the only user of the lab that didn’t have an office outside of the lab. Everyday at 11:30-12:30 he would put 2 chairs together and lay down and sleep (often loudly snoring). None of us knew how to approach it, especially when we needed to use the lab or get something out of it. He eventually retired and left with 0 notice.

    Another was at a job that had a 2nd shift that was either feast or famine. I was there on a very slow day so we started doing tours of places we hadn’t seen yet. For context, we were working on very high profile hardware that you’d now see as focal points in big name museums. We were touring an area with lots of compartments that echoed very badly. We started hearing a very loud snore that we couldn’t find. We walked around for a solid 20 minutes before we finally found the source.

  202. Goody*

    At a prior job, I had an awesome built-in desk setup in a corner, with lots of cabinets and a half-height privacy wall. I brought in a travel pillow and lap blanket that I stored in on of those cabinets. Lunchtime was nap time. I would set an alarm on my phone, put in the Bluetooth earbuds, and crawl into the kneehole space of my desk for a nap, then eat while I worked. I don’t think anyone ever caught on.

  203. K*

    I used to co-lead a midafternoon therapy group with a much more experienced therapist. I was so excited to work with him and learn from him! But what I actually learned was how to lead the group by myself because he fell asleep every single time.

  204. pally*

    I work in a business park. We have lots of open parking spaces. Many positioned right under shade trees. The other parking lots don’t seem to have many shade trees.

    So we’ve had more than our share of “regulars” i.e. vehicle nappers. We recognize their vehicles.

    They pull into our lot, park under a tree, and snooze. And about 30-40 minutes later, they leave. No harm done. Only sometimes management will see a strange vehicle in the lot and ask who that is. And we tell them, “oh, that’s the Honda sleeper.” Or, “that’s sleeping beauty in the red truck.” (Yeah, some have names)

  205. Statler von Waldorf*

    I’m going to put this out there for anyone who might need it.

    I used to have a problem falling asleep at work. I was tired all the time, and I would have tiny naps at lunch just to make it through the day. Finally my ex-wife got sick of me being tired all the time and pretty much forced me to go to the doctor, bless her soul. She was worried about my sleep, because I didn’t sleep well. I didn’t remember what happened when I slept, so it didn’t think it was a big deal.

    Yeah, I had sleep apnea. Really, really bad sleep apnea. My breathing stopped 105 times per hour when I had my sleep study done. According to my respiratory therapist, that was the highest apnea rate she had seen in her entire career.

    CPAP therapy changed my life for the better in so, so many ways. I don’t fall asleep anymore, I feel better during the day, and my health improved dramatically in many small different ways. No change I’ve ever made before has changed my life more.

    So if you are having long-term issues with feeling tired, please go to the doctor and get it checked out. As a result of my undiagnosed sleep apnea, my heart wall thickened, which was one of the causes of my heart attack a few years ago. Don’t be a dumbass like me and try and white-knuckle willpower your way through it.

  206. Pearl*

    My favorite napping-at-work moment was when I walked in on one of my coworkers facing the wall with his head in his hands. I asked him a question, and he immediately startled and yelled “Amen!” Might have worked on someone that didn’t know he was an atheist. The sleep marks on his face were also a dead giveaway that he did not suddenly find religion.

  207. Nightengale*

    I was in residency in the early years of them starting to care about us getting enough rest and not working more hours in a week than there are actual hours in a week. I’m in pediatrics and a leading sleep expert had just published a study on a bunch of pediatric residents where she put them in a driving simulator and compared the effect of a small amount of alcohol to a typical month with a lot of on-call nights.

    I am not a morning person and in fact was the most alert in training during the months I worked only nights. I don’t think well when I wake up before 6 AM. Many of my in-patients months required me to be up before 6 AM and so I was tired before I even got to work.

    During months of inpatient care, residents were given rooms to sleep in on-call and this was standard and expected that we would sleep in the hospital on-call if patient condition allowed. After being on-call, we would get up around 6, see our patients, round with the team and get our last bits of hand-off paperwork done and then go home by noon. Except I was often too tired to feel safe driving home. I was never a confident or coordinated driver and have since stopped driving entirely. Some days I felt too tired to even feel safe walking out to my car.

    So I would often nap for an hour or so in the provided on-call room before going home.

    The amount of push-back I got from this was really surprising. I was in a space that provided us space to sleep and with new understanding about the risk of doctors who were too tired, but the idea of NAPPING AT WORK in the afternoon before going home was just seen as 100% different from sleeping at work at night. People kept telling me to just go home implying I would rest better there. The fact that I kept saying I wasn’t safe to get home to rest there just. . . didn’t compute.

  208. SusieQQ*

    My first tech job had a nap room which was basically a room with three oversized bean bag chairs in it. I think most people used it more as a relaxation and calming room. I attempted to take naps in there a couple times (I was just back from maternity leave and utterly exhausted) but had a difficult time doing it. It just felt … weird to be sleeping at work. Plus I’m pretty sure the bean bag covers were never laundered and I’m a bit of a germophobe so it felt gross laying on them.

    TL;DR: a nap room sound like an awesome perk but in my experience it actually isn’t.

  209. Forrest Rhodes*

    One of my student colleagues in college was a great one for naps. We were both adults (me, 40; him, late 30s), and each of us handled a full-time student schedule plus two part-time jobs.

    If he felt himself wearing out during a study session at the campus library, he’d simply set his watch for 20 minutes, crawl under whatever table we were using, and curl up for a nap. I’d continue working; soon I’d hear the tiny beep of his watch and he’d take his chair and pick up where we left off, completely refreshed. It worked for him.

    He swore he was on the cusp of developing the ability to nap with one eye open—for use during a boring class—but I don’t think he ever actually succeeded with that one.

  210. Beth*

    I work in a doctors office. The clinic manager would routinely take her lunch break in one of the empty rooms and nap on the exam bed. 3-4x a week.

    Those beds are uncomfortable to sit on for more than five mins, I don’t know how she actually slept on them.

    1. I edit everything*

      I’ve spent many hours in the ER with my mother, often late into the night, and there’s one section that just has curtains between the beds, rather than walls. More than once, I stretched out on the neighboring bed, when it was available, for a nap. I found them to be more comfortable to lie on face down.

  211. Blueberry Grumpmuffin*

    At my first job, I would sometimes take naps on the couch at work. But one time I did so while the rest of the team was deploying a release containing my work, and since I wasn’t around to verify my stuff was working, the release got delayed. And my manager chastised me for it. That was the last time I took naps at any job, up until my current job.

    Since I work mostly from home now, I’ve resumed the occasional nap during the workday, and one of my colleagues even publicly says she takes afternoon naps. No one bats an eye, as long as our work gets done. It’s such a BLESSING!

  212. Blarg*

    I have idiopathic hypersomnia, a disorder similar to narcolepsy, in that I sleep all night (easily 10-12 hours) and also nap during the day for a few hours, when not treated. I’m in my mid-40s, and was not diagnosed until about a decade ago. Up til that point, I thought I was just really bad at human-ing, since everyone else stayed awake during the day, like … all the time. I slept everywhere, beginning when I was in elementary school. Class, meetings, never saw the ends of TV shows. I fell asleep during the SAT and other big exams – stress triggers my symptoms. I left a prestigious arts undergrad program because I could not stay awake during rehearsals and chalked it up to just not being that invested in that career, since no one else had that problem. I never had an explanation for any of this other than being told I was depressed.

    I developed coping strategies that I didn’t even realize were that. For instance, I gravitated to night shift jobs right out of high school. Stocked shelves at a big box store. Worked the overnights at my dorm’s front desk, etc. Because when you work nights, no one makes a fuss if you are sleep at night or during the day. When I worked regular shifts, I took a lot of naps on lunch breaks. I fell asleep during every full day meeting or conference I attended. Fell asleep during a 1:1 meeting with my grandboss once, in a room that was a little too warm. She was baffled more than anything.

    I am fortunate to be pretty competent and smart enough to get by with sleeping through classes and literally falling asleep on the job. When I was in my mid-30s, I moved to a new city and saw a new psychiatrist to re-up my depression meds. I described to him how my depression manifested itself, and he said, “what if you’re not sleepy because you’re depressed, but you’re depressed because you’re sleepy?”

    And then my life changed! I started meds (wakefulness promoters like armodafinil and stimulants like Ritalin), and sleep now about 9 hours/night and usually don’t nap. I’m off all the other psych meds. I’ve accomplished things I never dreamed possible, personally and professionally.

    But I know that many others with sleep disorders or other conditions that impact sleep or feeling sleepy are undiagnosed, untreated, or haven’t found a successful treatment. I feel so much compassion when I see folks asleep in public settings, especially when they ‘get in trouble’ with a boss or are embarrassed by a teacher or are mocked on social media. Maybe they could have gotten a better night’s sleep. Maybe it’s more than that. Either way … it happens.

    1. FuzzFrogs*

      Yes! Getting my narcolepsy diagnosed was a huge life changer for me. I relate so hard to that “can’t human” bit–I was so hard on myself for all these things I couldn’t seem to do. For a little while after my diagnosis, I was still hard on myself for some things–“why can’t I stay up til 3 am and also function during the rest of the week?”–but now I realize how I was just so used to degrading myself, in my head, and internalizing blame. I can do what I can do, and I can do so much more now that I actually know what my body needs. It’s amazing.

      1. Blarg*

        I’m very open about my condition, because towards the end of the work day, I can start to fade. And I always sign out ‘on time’ [with exceptions, obvs] and call it “turning into a pumpkin.” And several coworkers have adopted it as a signal of self-care/boundaries. “Pumpkining” has turned into a verb, which I love. We should ALL feel comfortable to end our work day when the work day ends, to decline invites/events that are going to strain our health or routines, or put us public facing when we aren’t at our best.

    2. azvlr*

      I think your post needs to be amplified. I’d be curious to know how many other readers have disordered sleep. I’ve been recently diagnosed myself and it has been life-changing for me. I feel super guilty about napping. Maybe I shouldn’t.

      I haven’t necessarily developed coping strategies to the degree you have, but have definitely made choices in my life related to the need to sleep and my inability to sit still for very long.

      1. Blarg*

        Congrats on getting a diagnosis, and please forgive yourself for having a human body. Best wishes as you figure all of this out — it is a pretty wild ride!

  213. MigraineMonth*

    I wanted to make a good impression at my first professional job, so when I was coming down with a cold I decided to take some non-drowsy cold medication and go to work as usual.

    Turns out I had an odd reaction to the medication, because I kept falling asleep in random places. On the bus to and from work. At my desk (multiple times). Even in a small meeting with my manager and a couple of other people, and yes, they all noticed.

    I apologized profusely to my manager when he brought it up and promised it wouldn’t happen again. Now when I have a cold I just stay home.

  214. FuzzFrogs*

    I’m a narcoleptic, so I was once prescribed workplace naps! It was…interesting, presenting the paperwork to my boss. I eventually got approved to take a longer lunch break, but they couldn’t provide a nap space, so I would’ve had to snooze in my car, right by the public entrance. So it didn’t really work out, and I never did take a nap there.

    If anyone else on AAM has narcolepsy, I’d love to hear how they’ve managed naps and work. I was lucky that I could get by without one, but I’m jealous of people who work from home, where a nap would be such a simple accommodation :(

      1. Fatima*

        Yes, I’ve always called that the sleepy time of day. I used to refuse to do training sessions then because it’s hard to keep the attention of a room full of sleepy people.

    2. The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon*

      Correct. If we weren’t supposed to nap at that time, 3 pm wouldn’t be Like That.

      1. Anon for this*

        I used to work in an office that was a converted storage room, so it got no ventilation at all. It was misery in the summer, and I would occasionally wake up to find I had passed out.

        Getting out of there was nice.

        3. maw*

          Many, many ages ago – I had a short-lived summer job in my mid-20s working as a receptionist at a very slow-paced organization located in a former bank. We had a flurry of activity first thing in the morning and at the end of the day. The air was so stuffy and still and the bulk of the workday was so without purpose or meaning that I fell asleep enough times that I got fired. And I didn’t even care….

    5. Justme, The OG*

      During the COVID WFH I would take lunch at 3:00 to take my dog on a quick walk and then nap.

      1. Polyhymnia O’Keefe*

        During early COVID, when we were working from home, making a thousand decisions and trying to keep our performing arts non-profit organization alive, my boss and I would text each other many days at around 2 or 3 PM about our naps. There was just so much going on, trying to figure out what our next steps were. Those afternoon naps were sanity-savers.

      2. I Have RBF*

        I work remotely. If I say I am “AFK for lunch”, that means one of two things: I am out running an errand, or I am taking a nap. I just work later in the day. I know for a fact that I’m not the only one – my boss takes naps too.

        In a previous open plan office, my manager, who commuted by transit very early in the day, would fall asleep in his chair after lunch. He sat across from me. I never mentioned it.

        I think the “siesta” concept is a good one, because after your brief nap you are more energized to take on the second half of your day.

        1. Snarl Trolley*

          This is so true. I have ADA accommodations allowing for a flexible schedule working from home so I can manage a 2-2.5-hour break in my workday (necessary for muscle rest; hands are wonked without it) and being able to conk out for a solid 90min mid-day is genuinely an energy gamechanger.

          Plus, there’s just something so inherently lux and pleasing about lying down to sleep when the sun is still up? It feels so fancy and adds an extra little dopamine boost because of it!

    6. KittenPup*

      Oh my, the nap thread brought back two very distinct memories. The first was a fresh out of college employee who was wearing a hoodie and enclosed her entire face within for a nap. It was a drawstring hoodie. 1. The hoodie was out of place for our office environment. 2. She lounged back in her chair to relax into her sleep. Her manager, my colleague, was in shock, but to his credit, he addressed immediately.
      At a different company, about ten years later I realized another fresh grad was napping at work, complete with pillow and her down coat on the floor under the stairs. This was a relatively open office environment so while the stairs were not used often, they were not enclosed or private.

      1. Ann Nonymous*

        If we’re allowed to take breaks, then why would taking a nap on that break be unacceptable? I’m a great taker of power naps (sleep for 1 REM cycle [20 mins] and wake up refreshed, but I do need a quiet, darkish environment. Shouldn’t be too much to ask.

    8. boldarticle*

      Hard agree. I had a yoga mat under my desk (fortunately my cube was inside a small fortress in a back corner) and could crawl under and crash for 20 minutes. The floor was concrete, so not much danger of going much longer than that. But it was usually at 3 pm like clockwork.

      1. DrB*

        I have seriously considered crawling under my cube desk to nap during migraines. That’s how I know it a bad one.

        1. Slovenly Braid Cultist*

          That’s the only time I have napped at work, with (at least) a migraine-adjacent headache. Turned off the lights in a phone room and set a 20 minute alarm. It was either that or go home for the rest of the day and I felt like the train ride would be murder.

    9. The land of nigh*

      There is nothing wrong with a 15 minute Power Nap in the mid-afternoon, and much to be said for it health-wise.

    11. Rage*

      “I’m going to go work on my spreadsheets. Shout if you need me.”

      *closes office door*

      *spreads sheets out on mattress*

  216. Quartermaster*

    I worked at a park that was usually dead all day. I would be lucky to see 10 people in my 8 hour shift. One day, I sat down in the grass, and it was beautiful, perfect sunny weather…. and then it was 30 minutes later, and I felt very refreshed. I’m glad no park visitors walked up, b

    At my current job, I frequently nap in my car during my lunch break and then eat my lunch later in the day. I’m a tired person!

  217. Anon for this*

    Once I worked in an office where my coworker/friend sat across from me, facing me, and our boss sat in a cubicle to the side of me. Coworker and I had open workstations but boss’s cube was pretty private. One day Coworker went missing for a few hours, and I assumed they’d had a meeting I didn’t know about. Years later, they told me they were extremely hungover that day and had taken a 2-hour nap under their desk. I have no idea how none of us noticed this.

    Later in my career I worked in a university that had a medical school, and I would sneak into the medical library at lunch to take naps. It was very quiet in there.

  218. Seen Too Much*

    I worked with someone who slept with her eyes open. She would put a spreadsheet in front of her and hold a pen in her hand. She would rest her chin on the other hand and sleep. For like an hour or more.

    When I moved to management, I had a nice conversation with her about how I won’t fall for it and it has to stop.

    She knew the president of the company very well and got away with murder (almost) – she once hit a customer on the head with a clipboard and kept her job. So I guess the napping wasn’t that crazy.

  219. Raddest Radish*

    For a few months a partner of mine was just NOT letting me get enough sleep, and a couple times a week I’d nod off at my desk. Back of the cubicle was open and visible to all coworkers passing by. However, with my long hair down & chin propped in hand, it wasn’t even too obvious… except for how I woke myself up with a snore more than once.

    I do not have a dainty snore. If I wasn’t exhausted into brainlessness I would have died of embarrassment.

    No one ever said anything. Management wasn’t present–there was some kind of legal thing out of state they were all busy with–so it was almost 100% low-rank schmucks like me, and frankly my job was kind of superfluous half the time.

    When I started dozing off at the wheel mid-commute (never let it get to this point, this was the scariest thing I’ve ever been through), I finally put my foot down and established a need for adequate rest *at home*. I think it has been years since I snored at my desk. Hopefully.

  220. Risky Biscuits*

    I have frequently accidentally fallen asleep in the middle of work. Most egregiously and improbably, I once fell asleep while standing up painting a wall. I woke up to discover my face had been pressed against the freshly-painted wall, the roller still in my hand, and I’d been sleeping for like 10 or 15 minutes. At that same job, I once fell asleep after sitting down on the toilet… and I didn’t wake up for an hour. Somehow no one noticed either of these events.

    Thankfully my newer ADHD medication has the helpful side effect of preventing me from falling asleep during business hours, so this hasn’t happened in some time.

  221. mreasy*

    Worked at a toystore in my early 20s. There was always at least one person taking a nap in the stuffed animal backstock.

  222. Global Cat Herder*

    My uncle would regularly take a “power nap” after lunch. He’d close his office door, turn the lights off, put his feet up on his desk, and nap for about 20 minutes. He said it was part of his creative process and made sure he had a productive afternoon. Everyone knew he did this and respected his naptime.

    One day his chair suddenly broke and dumped him on the floor mid-nap. Because his feet were on his desk, he broke his leg quite badly. He was out for a few weeks, so he filed for worker’s comp – and since his employer knew about and condoned the napping, he got paid for his nap injury.

    2. Artemesia*

      I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter how the accident occurs if it is on the job, it gets workers comp.

      1. BubbleTea*

        I’m fairly certain you can’t get workers comp for injuring yourself doing something you’ve been specifically prohibited from doing.

  223. I edit everything*

    My dad was a college professor (biology), and a few years before he retired, he took a cot to work and kept it in his office for naps. We’ve always said that his side of the family can fall asleep anywhere–we have pictures of he and his siblings sitting together at a family reunion, and every one of them is asleep. AFAIK, no one had a problem with his taking “a few minutes on the horizontal,” as my grandfather described it.
    When my brother was diagnosed with narcolepsy, we decided it probably runs in the family.

  224. Lisa*

    My first office job was at a small nonprofit with equally small budget (pre-pandemic, so in person 5 days a week). They ended up hiring someone who wasn’t a great fit for a few reasons – no relevant professional experience and an unsustainable commute (1.5hrs one way, more if traffic) being the big two.

    This person would routinely arrive insanely early or late—absolutely no middle ground—and end up falling asleep at their desk (or in meetings!!! Cringe!) at various points throughout the day. On days where they arrived early, I would come in to find them with their head down and sound machine app on. They were unceremoniously fired six months into their tenure.

  225. Dek*

    I worked at a historical tourist attraction, and one of the best things was that there were two break rooms–an active one with bright lights and tables and all for food and chatting, and a quiet one that looked like something out of Downton Abbey, with the lights dimmed that was perfect for reading or napping.

    I’ve taken the occasional lunchnap where I’ll set a timer and curl up in my chair. But it’s hardly comfortable.

  226. Lily C*

    A few years back, before he finally retired, our senior partner would fall asleep in his office fairly regularly, but would usually wake up if his phone rang. Chair leaned back, feet up on table, snoring, the whole nine yards, and mostly with the door closed. One afternoon, his assistant, whom I sat next to, tried to transfer a call to him, but he didn’t pick up. She could hear the phone ringing through the closed door, so we knew it hadn’t been put on mute, but we also couldn’t hear any of the usual snoring, or any indication that he was on another call. She tried calling him again. No answer. She tried knocking loudly on the door. No answer. She very carefully opened the door, and there he was, laying back in his chair, mouth wide open. She tried calling his name, but he didn’t respond. Neither of us wanted to get close enough to check his breathing or pulse, so we came up with a plan. I dialed 9-1 and held my finger over the second 1. She went back to his door, opened it, tried calling his name again, and when he still didn’t respond, she slammed the door shut as loudly as she could! Then walked back to her desk, counted to five, and tried calling his phone again. Thank god he picked up!

  227. Jules the 3rd*

    Twenty years ago, my office-mate took a brief nap after lunch, pretty much every day. She:
    1. Asked if it was ok when we were talking about whether we wanted to share an office
    2. Had her own little pillow and eyeshade
    3. Never complained if I had to take a meeting during that time.

    No drama. This is how you do it. She was a great office-mate. She retired a few years later, and traveled the country in an RV with her husband.

  228. geek5508*

    years ago while working with the National Park Service, our crew was at a picnic pavilion, cleaning/prepping our gear because a heavy rain kept us from working. One team member laid out on a picnic table and fell fast asleep. When our Supervisor came by, someone was about to wake the guy up, but our supervisor said “Nope – as long as he’s sleeping, he has a job. But when he wakes up, he’s fired”. So we let the guy sleep!

  229. Goddess47*

    This time, I’m the napper.

    I was in grad school, working full time and taking classes after work. The classroom was an interior room with no windows and in a popular location, so that by 6 pm the room was warm and… musty, shall I say.

    One week, I was exhausted from working all day and made the mistake of putting my chin on my hand and closed my eyes… next thing I know is the instructor peering closely at me and asking kindly (something he was definitely not known for!) “Are you all right?”

    Silly me did not think to say, “Oh. Give me a moment. Let me go and get a drink of water.” Oh, no! My mouth says, “I’m fine, go on without me.”

    While my classmates were amused and I was the hero for sassing a relatively unpopular professor, let’s just say I didn’t do well in that class that semester.

  230. River*

    We found out after they ended up getting let go, among other reasons, that one of the managers was caught on more than one occasion napping in her office. She did not have a disclosed medical condition or any special permissions from the higher ups that she was allowed to sleep in her office. The only window she has to her office is a sidelight window, next to the solid door, that she would close the doors and blinds to whenever she needed privacy or in this case would take a nap. Her naps were typically later afternoon and so people thought it was weird that she often would “leave early for the day” but that was not the case.

    Her boss one day needed access to something that was in her office and being one of the few people in the company that has full authority to access anything, her boss opened the door and caught her underneath her desk taking a full snoring nap! She got in trouble of course but then a year later or so she ended up getting fired for napping and more. This manager was in the job for 20+ years so it was probably time for them to retire and move on anyway.

    It makes me upset the people that get paid very well and think they can do things like napping for example. Meanwhile there’s people barely making a liveable wage and work their arse off. I know this is not a new concept but I guess that’s just life.

  231. Artemesia*

    I worked for a well known president/chancellor of many prestigious universities in the US who routinely fell asleep while conducting meetings. He was always a very ‘busy’ guy so guess he had to catch some winks somewhere. No explanation (e.g. narcolepsy? or whatever) was every given.

  232. Colorado Winters*

    When I worked a soul-sucking retail job for a now-defunct Sears affiliate, I was the person who dealt with pricing and signing, so I was rarely on the floor with customers. I had a desk in the corner of a huge room full of signing/sign holders. My desk was also enclosed with cubicle walls, so I couldn’t be seen from the sides. I took to climbing under my desk and pulling in the chair to sleep on the ground. Sometimes, I’d also just go sit in a bathroom stall and lean my head on the partition. When the store was prepping for liquidation, I would go into the last aisle of the back corner of the upstairs stockroom and pretend that I was organizing things, only to lay down on a shelf and nap or read a book.

    1. River*

      You just took me back to the episode of The Office where Daryl shows Pam and Jim his secret spot where he takes naps in the warehouse!

  233. Link*

    Previous warehouse job, was really chill, kinda miss it tbh, but they had a shop cat, and that fluffy orange menace would hop onto my shoulder and start purring while I was eating lunch. One day I woke up 4 hours after lunch with the fuzzy feline purring on me non stop. It was later reported to me that each time someone came in to wake me up, they got hisses to ears and paws bapping at their face to get them to leave me be. Everyone took the hint from the orange menace.

    Naturally wasn’t paid for my nap, but I really couldn’t care less if I was or not, that was the best nap I had in my life. Only time I fell asleep at work as well. And I swear that nap fixed me for at least a few weeks after.

  234. Katie*

    A guy was caught sleeping on one of the couches at work (meant for meetings or presentations). When confronted by management he indignantly asked ‘But where else am I supposed to sleep?!’.

  235. tired chemist*

    A year or so ago I had to manually monitor/collect data from an experiment once an hour for 24 hours. I spent most of the day dozing on the couch in the break room to make up for only being able to sleep in 45 minute chunks. New parents, I am so so sorry. I cannot imagine doing that for longer than one night/day!

  236. gmezzy*

    Ooh fun. I spent some time working in Ho Chi Minh City maybe 12 years ago. It was a foreign-run software development company (the CTO and CEO were from the USA, while investors were mostly European), but the majority of staff were Vietnamese. The office provided lunch.
    Every day, after lunch, the staff would turn off all the lights and take a nape. Some people had little mats or pillows they would pull out. Some people would lay out on empty tables. It was pretty great that it was so normalized and I wish more US based employers understood that human beings have human body needs.

      1. allathian*

        Even there it’s less common than it was. If the commute’s short enough, many employees go home for their break, meaning 4 rush hours.

  237. DJ Abbott*

    I’ve never taken a nap at work, but so often wished I could! I’d be so much healthier, more alert, more comfortable…
    When I was first getting started in business, there was buzz about Japanese businessmen being allowed to take naps.
    Meanwhile, I’ve seen my colleague go into the unused office for a nap on her lunch break. Because she stays up watching movies at night.

    1. Melody*

      I used to sleep in my car on my lunch break because I’d get so sleepy.
      Once my boss did the same… and accidentally turned it into a 4 hour nap!

  238. Katie*

    Because of the world we live in, I work a very weird combination of jobs that sometimes mean I start one at 5:30 AM and end another at 8 PM. If I don’t have time in between for a little nappy nap, I have a little menty b.

  239. AMY*

    I fell asleep at work once. It was so embarrassing.

    But in my defense I had never worked midnights before, so I guess I just didn’t realize how a lack of sleep would get to me. One minute I was reading some paperwork, the next minute (actually it was over 45 minutes) my supervisor was shaking me awake to call me into her office. This was in front of like, 50 people.

    She expressed disappointment, said it was actually a firable offence, but she knew I was a good worker so she would leave it alone. Just made me promise not to do it again.

    I got mad at a couple of co-workers who had seen me sleeping and didn’t wake me up. I know it wasn’t their fault but at the time I felt like they should have woken me up. They said they didn’t want to disturb me. (Seriously, thanks but I mean, better that than letting me get fired right? LOL)

  240. Melody*

    My first office job had a sign up saying people could not sleep on the clock.
    I’m going to admit that I was disappointed – because as a recent grad, I was REALLY used to a midday nap & had definitely thought of taking a quick sleep when things got slow.

    Is that banana pants? Totally. But I was 21 & it was my first 40 hour a week job.

    Fastforward… I don’t know… 8 years and I was working in an office with a young nepo-hire, the owner’s son, who fell asleep at his desk every afternoon & didn’t wake up for an hour or so, no matter how loud the office got.

    Feeling mostly amused about it, most of us just let him sleep.
    Some people made a game out of seeing how many weird/loud noises they could make without waking him up.

    Eventually, the office manager – who constantly complained that she wasn’t anyone’s mother and then proceeded to act like everyone’s mother – put a stop to it by reprimanding him in front of his parent, who couldn’t understand why no one said anything sooner.

    1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

      I do feel like there’s a difference between “in the workplace” and “on the clock”, yes.

      If it’s an official break, and particularly an unpaid break, I don’t really see why napping is not ok but reading a book would be.

      I’ve only had two workplace naps during my career in law. Once was under the desk, clocked off, and attracted very odd looks. The other was in a conference room whilst heavily pregnant and the sympathetic senior partner offered to drive me home.

  241. Em*

    About 10 years ago I worked a 4am shelf stocking shift at a big box store, and a lot of the employees were college students so it was not totally unheard of for people to come in after having been out all night.

    We all took break at the same time, and one coworker who was still a little buzzed from drinking the night before decided to use the break to take a nap on one of the benches in the shoe department. We ended up letting her sleep for half an hour before we started worrying a manager would find her and decided to wake her up.

  242. JJ*

    There’s a man at my office who sits in the main common area every day after lunch for probably 20-30 minutes with his feet up on the table, headphones in, snoozing away. You have to walk by him to get to the stairwell and the kitchen.

  243. Morag*

    I once got a report of an employee that might be having a medical issue. Since I was in a different part of the building the reporting employee (unfortunately) sent me a photo of the person. They were in a glass fronted office with a desk that faced the busy hallway. They were sitting in the desk chair, with their back to the hallway and feet propped high up on the wall behind the desk. They appeared to be slumped in the chair, which was concerning. Turns out they were just napping. In someone else’s office.

  244. Rage*

    This wasn’t work *per se* but it was at church when I was a teenager. I woke up feeling just “eh” but as the morning progressed, I started to feel much worse. I went into our Youth Ministry room and stretched out on the sofa.

    I heard a conversation outside the door, between our Pastor and my younger brother. The person scheduled to be acolyte that morning had not shown up, would Brother please fill in? My brother replied, “No, but Rage will. She’s in there.”

    What choice did I have? I agreed with a sigh and dragged myself to the sacristy to get robed.

    I managed OK until it came time for the sermon. Our Pastor wasn’t long-winded by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a period of time where I didn’t have to follow along to the service or do anything other than sit there, in my chair next to the podium. You can guess what happened.

    I fell asleep. You couldn’t tell; I didn’t fall out of the chair or start snoring. But after the sermon was over and they started to collect the offering…that’s when Pastor noticed. He was hissing my name, and I suddenly woke up, realized what had happened, and got up to do what I was supposed to do.

    After the service, my mother got a bit irritated with me for falling asleep (which is something she had NEVER seen me do before, but of course why would she assume something was wrong?). I told her I wasn’t feeling well, thought I had a fever, and the rest was history.

    “If you didn’t feel well,” she remonstrated gently, “you should have said so and had Pastor ask somebody else. Brother could have served instead.”

    I looked my brother right in the eye. “Pastor asked Brother to do it first, but I overheard him say that he wouldn’t do it, but that I would. I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice at that point.”

    I felt no guilt as my mother lit into my brother for such blatant disrespect.

  245. Ann O'Nemity*

    One of my old coworkers had narcolepsy and she had the best accommodations! She could take naps as needed, got a prime desk location next to the window that was usually given based on seniority, flexible arrival time, and the ability to work from home before it was commonplace.

  246. jane's nemesis*

    I made it about halfway through reading all these comments and had to go lay down and take a nap LOLOL. (I wfh)

  247. RinBin*

    We had a temp in our office that was hoping to get hired to a full time permanent position; he seemed nice enough. Then, one day, anyone with a cube near him had their work interrupted by LOUD snoring. We woke him up. 20 minutes later- More loud snoring. This happened a few more times and once he was even woken up by his boss.

    At the end of the day we were all leaving a bit early to go out for some “best of luck on your next adventure” drinks for a departing team mate. We stood around his desk, listening to him snore, joking about leaving him there to wake up to an empty office (we didn’t, because it would have been mean). We woke him up one final time to invite him out with us. He put his head up, looked at all of us, said “No thanks, I’m good,” and put is head back down on his arms on his desk to go back to sleep.

    His contract was terminated the following day.

  248. soontoberetired*

    Years ago I worked with someone who would fall asleep in small meetings, 4 or less people where you sat right across from the other people in the meeting. This happened repeatedly. I became concerned and the PM of that project told me this happened in every meeting. I thought the person might be ill and expressed my concern to my own manager. turns out this person was working a job until 3 am and then coming in at 8 am with very little sleep. And was unproductive – they were getting absolutely nothing done. And were soon gone. they had kept their job longer than they should have because of a personal relationship with their first manager. New manager had enough fairly quickly. (old manager did get demoted because of things like this, they should have let him go, I think today that would have happened).

  249. Daytripper75*

    I use my break times to nap on days I need it. I keep a pillow and blanket under my desk, I started this practice when I was pregnant and carry it on to today. My employer gets a better quality of work out of me when I am rested! I have very sweet coworkers who ask others to keep it down while I rest. “Shhh! Daytripper75 is napping!” Not necessary but charming and appreciated.

  250. Ciela*

    We have 2 reception desks, but only one receptionist, so she sits at the slightly larger desk that is also a few feet closer to the front door. But then on her lunch break she would sit at the other desk, still in view of the front door, and just lean back in the chair, fold her arms, and take a nap. The classic “I’m not sleeping, I’m just resting my eyes” pose.
    So napping at work is odd, but purposely going to nap at a different desk somehow is more odd.

    1. Azure Jane Lunatic*

      I imagine it could be for two reasons.

      First, if anyone sees her asleep at the other desk and thinks she’s asleep while she’s supposed to be working, she will be able to say that it’s her lunch break and you can tell because she’s at the other desk.

      Second, so she doesn’t get used to napping in her regular desk.

      When my own sleep issues were not under control, and I had to take breaks from long drives to nap, I would go sit in the passenger seat to nap without being buckled in, so I would not get used to sleeping in the driver’s seat.

      1. Morag*

        AJL – your car nap idea is brilliant! Such a great idea to use the passenger seat. I’m always a bit worried that I’d start up the car still half asleep if I try to nap in the driver’s seat.

  251. MicroManagered*

    In college I worked in the library, putting returned books back on the shelf and reorganizing any shelves that were not in perfect Dewey Decimal order. It was a huge library over 10 stories tall, so we worked in crews and went floor by floor. We often finished our work with hours to spare, so we did what any hard-working college students would do: We took naps in the stacks!

    We’d go to the sections of the library that we knew had less foot traffic. We’d lay down and one person would volunteer to be the lookout. The lookout’s job was to stay awake and kick a metal bookshelf to wake others up if they saw someone coming, or when our shift was over — whichever came first.

  252. Quality Girl*

    A medical laboratory I used to work at had a day shift employee who was nearing retirement. Apparently he would go into the back room, lean his face against a microscope so it looked like he was working, and sleep. First off, that’s terrible scope technique, and secondly, the eye pieces are hard plastic so that would be incredibly uncomfortable. Unsurprisingly he had other issues; management refused to do anything about him. Squeaky stair indeed.

  253. Laura LL*

    My org had a nap/meditation/resting room for years and I used to take advantage of it pretty regularly. They had the type of bed you might find in a doctor’s office (although not as high tech) and a long piece of paper over it for hygiene purposes, I guess. They also had a sofa and a chair. at some point they took away the bed. According to rumor, they did that so people would stop napping there, but I continued to nap on the couch.
    I think they either got rid of the couch eventually or just closed the room completely. I didn’t know that though because I moved to a cube that faced a wall, so I could sleep under a desk, and then about a year and half after that I got a new position at the same org that came with an office, so I’d just close the door and nap on the floor behind the desk. The naps were so necessary.

  254. Spartacus Bagel's Wife*

    Interestingly, this has come up twice in my work (though both before my time).

    Relevant context here is that we typically work with people very new to work.

    This happened in the same work placement that is essentially customer facing in a very quiet environment – I mean, nothing happens.

    So Ashley was alone on the outward facing desk, had headphones in (first mistake) and dozed off for the utter lack of stimulus. (they were coached on busy work).

    And Bailey. Alone at the desk. Who put up their hoodie…feet on the desk…and went to sleep.

    Ashley apologised, was coached and was cut a lot of slack.
    Bailey was let go.

  255. Peep*

    Once during my work study job at a rare books library, I was told to shelf read (look at every book on the shelf and make sure it’s shelved in the correct order by call number) a section of books in the storage area. It was a low shelf, it was very dim, and very cold, so I was sitting on a rolly stool bundled up in a giant jacket… I fell asleep for a bit on the stool, my head sideways to read the call numbers. It was so dark!! And cold!! I had to hibernate!

  256. Feral Humanist*

    I used to live on the East Coast and fly regularly to the West Coast, where my family is located. Flying eastward is a PITA because of the time difference, so I often red-eyed back to avoid wasting an entire day of PTO. I’d go home from the airport, shower, and get to the office more or less on time.

    This was fine for about three years, but it got harder to function on ~4 hours of not-great sleep as I got older. About the time I turned 35 and it started to get noticeably more difficult, I changed jobs and got a proper office with a lockable door. I bought an extra thick yoga mat and stored it under my desk so that I could power-nap on afternoons I had red-eyed back. It was either that or take sick time because about 3pm I became a zombie.

    It worked great, but I’d only been in that job about 4 months when covid happened and it all became a moot point! My visits home post-covid all involved working remotely and were long enough that I no longer felt the need to red-eye home. And now I live in the same time zone as my family again, thank goodness.

  257. Bunny Girl*

    I used to work for a grad program at a university and there was a “Wellness Room” that no one ever used. Probably because it was dark and in an unpleasant part of the basement. There was only one new mother in our building anyway and she would just lock the door to her office to pump.

    But alas it was the only place that people didn’t harass me or look for me. So sometimes I would go take naps in there, despite it being not the most welcoming place (I will sleep anyway and everywhere).

    One day the cabinet door was open a little and I opened it to try to shove things back in there. There was a sleeping bag, some snacks, and some toiletries along with a change or two of clothes. I honestly think someone was probably living in there and was using the showers next door. It made me really sad because I’m sure it was one of the students (if you know, you know).

  258. T James*

    I’m not sure what came over me, but one afternoon several years ago I just could not stay awake. I struggled and struggled, but I kept dozing off and finally I gave in. I locked my office door, put my head on the desk and was immediately asleep. I woke up about 20 minutes later, my face in a puddle of drool.

    I currently work from home 2 or 3 days a week and one of the great joys is slipping into my bedroom mid-afternoon and napping. In fact, I’m going to do that right now.

  259. PDB*

    I used to be a production sound mixer in TV and I napped all the time under the console. I was famous for it. I can sleep any where, any time.

  260. Peep (again)*

    Oh, and the other time when I was reviewing digitized home movies from the 20s and 30s at a film facility…. all day, in a nearly silent environment. I luckily wasn’t contributing any expertise at checking the color/exposure or speed, but I had to sit there and watch as they were adjusted alllll day, and then watch them again to confirm the choices. Silent films. In the dark. After lunch. Films literally of sawing logs in the PNW. Zzzzz… It was less than a minute, I hope. XD

  261. Spicy Tuna*

    My dad is the founding member of the Daytime Sleepers Association – Early to bed, late to rise and plenty of sleep in between!

    He retired in 1996 or 1997 and was able to get raises and promotions while using a daily 2 hour lunch to run, shower and nap, AND leave at 5PM on the dot every day. He napped on a couch in his office that he had the company purchase for him.

    Jobs like that just do not exist anymore, friends.

  262. ragazza*

    At my old job, I used to go sit in my car in the parking lot, push the seat back, and nap for about 20 minutes. Sometimes I drove to a local park if I had time. It was very refreshing. That was the only thing I appreciated about having to drive to that office, because otherwise there was no place to hide for a little shut-eye.

  263. ticktick*

    We were the direct cause of someone’s nap once. A friend who was also a coworker was working as a software developer, and couldn’t resist grazing on food if it was in front of him. For his birthday, we planned things so that someone would show up at his desk every hour on the hour with large plates of good food, beginning with a full breakfast in the first hour, progressing through plates of brownies and other snacks, to a large burger for lunch, followed by sausage rolls and more snacks…by the time 3 pm rolled around, he’d admitted defeat and had to catch a half hour nap in the server room.

  264. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

    I had a nap incident on Monday. I was training a group of new hires in a Teams meeting. One guy had his camera on and was working from his bedroom. At one point during my presentation, his wife/girlfriend came into the bedroom and flopped on the bed for a nap. Then their dog followed her and curled up on the bed. A couple minutes later, he got up from his chair, crawled into bed, and started napping with them. I don’t think he realized his camera was on.

    I turned his camera off and continued with my presentation. He had to redo the training with a one-on-one trainer who made him leave the camera on the whole time to make sure he wasn’t slipping away for a snooze again.

  265. Llama Llama Workplace Drama*

    I’m a computer programmer and have been working at home since March 2020. I have a big overstuffed chair in my home office and often will take a nap over lunch.

    Years ago I worked in an office and a guy who had the cube at the end of the row would actually climb under his desk and lie down and take a 20 minute nap everyday.

  266. Quill*

    I fell asleep in a meeting once, got (rightfully) told by my grandboss to stay home if I was going to be sick (I was getting over a cold.) Of course, I had been on the job a bit over one month and didn’t have sick days yet, so that wasn’t going to happen.

  267. Ollie*

    I was on a medication that made it hard to sleep at night. So around 2-3PM I was tired. And I was bored anyway. I was not being kept busy. So I would go into the bathroom, sit on the toilet, lean my head forward and nap.

  268. HereToRead*

    I teach kindergarten. Two years ago, I worked with a kindergarten teacher who was…. Not a good match for teaching. At all. Once on a parent-teacher conference day, some parents of students from her class came to me because they couldn’t find their child’s teacher anywhere. Turned out this teacher had turned out the classroom lights, crawled under her desk, and took a nap. I’m sure the parents will never forget walking with me to her classroom and beholding this teacher crawling out from a desk, putting her shoes back on, and going ‘let’s start your conference!’

  270. Calyptogena*

    At a previous job, I worked as a forensic scientist. Specifically, I tested drug evidence to confirm that the powders and crystals confiscated actually contained illicit drugs. One of my responsibilities was to testify at trials about the results of my analysis. Typically, my testimony is divided into two sections. The first section establishes my credentials and confirms that I’m qualified to testify, and the second section is where I provide the results of my testing.

    One time, I was testifying for an older prosecutor. The prosecutor’s office was short staffed and had pulled this gentleman out of retirement. He had just finished establishing my credentials and told the judge, “Your honor, I submit this individual as an expert in the analysis of seized drugs.” He then propped his elbow on the podium and stood waiting.

    The judge replied, “Thank you Mr. Prosecutor. Defense, do you have any questions?” The defense attorney stated that they had no questions, so the judge continued. “Very well, Mr. Prosecutor, you may proceed.”….Silence…

    The whole court looked at the prosecutor who was standing with his elbow still propped on the podium, his chin on his chest, breathing deeply. We were all a little stunned. The judge repeated in a louder voice, “You may proceed!” The prosecutor jerked his head up, looked around a moment, managed to figure out what was going on, and then resumed questioning me. He returned to retirement shortly after that trial.

  271. Tilly*

    In the early 2000s, when I was in my early 20s, I worked admin in a state agency. My desk was part of a pair of cubes in a cube farm, and most days during my lunch hour I would nap under my desk with a blanket, pillow, and space heater I kept in a drawer for napping purposes. I would set an alarm on my phone to wake me up before my lunch break ended, but my cube mate (who usually ate at his desk) would also usually make sure I was up at the right time.

    One day my cube mate had gone somewhere while I was asleep, and I had also unknowingly turned off my phone alarm (it was really cozy under the desk with the space heater for white noise). About an hour after I should have been awake my desk phone started ringing, and it was my boss, whose office was the wall away from my desk, asking what I was doing. I said, “Oh no! I overslept!” It turned out that one of my other coworkers, who I had a less congenial relationship with than I had with my cubemate, had seen me on the floor and told my boss he was concerned I was having a medical episode, because I was laying under my desk. Luckily, my boss found it amusing, but also told me I wasn’t allowed to have a space heater in the building, and also I should probably stop napping under my desk (all of which is completely reasonable, obviously). I agreed, but also said, “[Coworker] saw me under the desk and was worried I was having a medical episode, but came to tell you instead of checking on me??”

    Obviously I was extremely lucky that I didn’t get in trouble for this, and would never behave this way now. Now I work from home and can freely nap at lunch as well as I set several alarms. So far so good!

    I would obviously never dream (ba dum bum) of doing this now,

  272. werewolf*

    Just took a 15-minute nap in a storage closet that only my team has access to. Years ago I fell asleep at my desk, so now I take intentional naps to stave off unintentional snoozes.

  273. Also Laura Actually!*

    Two of my good friends are medical professionals. They’re also married to each other. They worked in the same clinic for a while and had a fractious toddler at home. The spouse who’s a doctor would close their office door and take a nap at some point in the day. The nurse partner had no office and of course couldn’t do that. Didn’t make for the most harmonious dinner conversation!

    I had a boss many years ago at a retail job who would shut himself in a closet with a bedroll and nap for an hour or two on occasion. There was hell to pay if he was woken up. It was a pain because the radio/CD player (it was around 2000) was in there, along with the surveillance cameras for the store and the safe. If you needed anything, you were SOL until he woke up unless you wanted to get yelled at.

  274. BrightLights*

    I fell asleep at an international conference.

    They flew us all out to the head office in Europe. I was the one representative of my office (in the US.) I had a red eye flight out the night before the conference started- that was the one flight available and I thought no big deal, I can normally sleep on planes. This time was different. Okay, well, it hasn’t been THAT long since I was young enough to pull an all nighter, I’ll have a lot of coffee and it will be fine, right? (Note: it has been THAT long.)

    At around 3PM local time they brought us into the UX office. Which had three real chairs, a sofa, and a lot of bean bags. I got a bean bag.

    The outcome of this was absolutely predictable.

    None of my coworkers ever said a thing (including people I work with very closely now) so I have to wonder if we all did the same thing.

  275. Worker Bee Becky*

    Years ago, as a social worker who made frequent home visits to my clients, I was hurt on the job. A slip and fall on a newly-polished marble tile floor that the homeowner failed to warn me about, leading to a broken ankle, a tear in my right hip muscle, and chronic back pain with herniated discs. I was off work for close to four months. Upon my return to work, I was introduced to a new supervisor, since my previous one decided government social work was not for her. I worked in a not-so-desirable area of the county, so the prospects were slim. Very slim. One person put in for the position. And she was hired without so much as an interview. When we met for the first time, she asked the normal getting-to-know-you questions, then asked about my injuries. In talking to her, it came up that I needed to take semi-frequent breaks due to pain and learning how to put weight on my foot again. She told me to close her door and said, “Listen, if you ever feel like you need to go home in the middle of the day and rest, or take a nap, you do that. You don’t need to worry about letting me know; I know you will get your work done.” I told her that I did not think that was necessary but thanked her for the offer. She said, “What I mean is, if you need to sleep during your work hours, I don’t care.” I later learned (quickly, I might add) that her offer was more a foreshadowing of her habits. Every day, at 10am on the nose, she would hang a sign on her door, in all caps, bold, red and underlined size-72 font, that said, “DO NOT KNOCK OR DISTURB.” And our clerk became her door/office monitor. No one could gain access to her until at least 2pm. A full four hours, regardless of the reason. One time, there was a fire drill, and she did not wake up, even when the clerk tried to rouse her. So we were told to leave her behind. There might have been a medical reason for her need to sleep, but it was her snoring that was, in some ways, the larger issue. She could be heard on the other side of the building — literally. We worked in a renovated warehouse, so sounds carried. We all just eventually made sure our home visits coincided with her four-hour naps in order to have some peace, as even noise-cancelling headphones would not drown out the noise. At one point, the office next to her was empty, and some of us overheard her asking another coworker if they could measure the space in the empty office as she was thinking of placing a chaise lounge in the office “for us to take our breaks”. We all knew she meant to have a sleeping pod for her daily naps. That plan was thwarted when they hired a new supervisor for the unit next door and placed the new supervisor in the empty office — on the same day my supervisor was having her brother deliver said chaise lounge. The sadness (there might even have been a tear or two shed) when she saw the new supervisor moving in lives in my memory to this day.

  276. Your Average Nonprofit Worker*

    In my first job out of college, I worked for a well known nonprofit that is most famous for its overnight relay-style fundraiser. My office was about an hour south of my apartment, and the community I was assigned to was two hours further south of the office. I was assigned to two events there: a community event, that usually met at 6pm on weekdays once a month, and a college event, that usually met at 8pm on weekdays once a month.

    When I had to go to the college meetings, I would log off at 4, ask the admin (who left at 5) not to turn the alarm on when she left, and nap on the floor of my office for a couple hours (about 4-6) before driving down to the meeting. If the meeting didn’t run over, I’d leave there at 9pm and walk in my door at midnight. I got the “Road Warrior” award that year because I did so much driving. My mileage reimbursement was like a third paycheck.

  277. Trick or Treatment*

    Just this month I started working at a place that has a “power nap pod”. It’s labelled as that, is darkened and has a comfy reclining chair. When it was shown to me, it was in use (has a little indicator light). Haven’t tried it yet because I don’t go to the office often.

  278. Tess of the D'atabases*

    I’m WFH, so I nap randomly when I need it. I just make sure my work is done before I go.

  279. Library Anoshe*

    When my two children were toddlers, and I was working full-time as a temp and going to grad school full time online as a single parent, there were definitely days I needed a nap. I had one job at at cable company and I’d fall asleep sitting on the toilet leaning up against the wall during my 15 minute breaks and would also take a 30 minute nap in my car if the weather wasn’t too hot during my lunch breaks.

    During 2020/21, we had a 6ft Comfy Sack in a room that was normally used for programs, but was being used for storage of things we couldn’t have out for a while. That giant fluffy beanbag had more than one co-worker take a nap in it!

  280. Queen of the World*

    A finance manager I used to work with would occasionally take 10 minute power naps. She’d shut her door, turn off the light and lay her head down. Then get up, get back to work and didn’t miss a beat. We all thought it was a little odd but she worked long hours and was a true overachiever so the boss winked at it.

  281. NurseThis*

    Was a night RN for many years. Found many fellow nurses sleeping on the job. Most egregious was a fellow RN at a children’s hospital on night shift. We were always very busy as this hospital did most of its admissions at night. I was flagged down by a parent that their child’s IV fluids had run out. After I replaced the bag I went in search of the child’s nurse and found her sleeping in a crib in the storage room.

  282. PBJ*

    Back when I was a secondary school teacher we had a staff Christmas party that resulted in a pub crawl. The (older) Deputy Headteacher hung on with us until around 11pm and after he left we carried on until closing time. Needless to say, the next day we were VERY hungover. Student’s book hs been left in a pub. People had vomited. It was a mess.
    My next door classroom colleague was having a rough time of it, so on her free period she locked herself in her classroom, manouvered a cupboard to block anyone looking in through the porthole window and took a power nap on a student desk. She woke up telling me how refreshed she felt and worked through til 5pm.

  283. Dad joke nap equivalent*

    Back in the good old days, I was told by a colleague to always keep a box of paper clips handy. If you had to nap, you could close your door, spread them all over the floor a body length away from the door, and lay down with your feet touching the door to nap. That way, if anyone came in, you’d get jostled and could plausibly claim to be picking up the paper clips. Not napping, no way; just tidying up in here!

  284. zolk*

    At a previous job we had a large basement breakroom with two enormous couches and a communal eating table. I would scarf down my lunch, set a timer on my phone, and nap. My boss was often there and thought it was funny/harmless.

    Alas, current role does not have a space for naps. Sometimes I put my feet up on the desk, recline, and pass out for a bit during lunch. It’s very helpful! (And my office door closes and has no window, and my office mate does not care.)

    (Canada)

    1. Wendy Darling*

      At a previous job we worked with and also stored a lot of hardware so we had a “team room” that was all shelves, benches for working on the hardware, and a sofa that was in the room before it became our team room and had nowhere else to go.

      Only my immediate team had access to the room, which was locked at all times, so if one of us was having a particularly rough day we would absolutely sneak in for a brief nap on the couch. Sometimes I just went and sat in there and watched netflix on my phone for half an hour because I needed a break.

      It was the kind of job where there aren’t coverage needs so as long as everyone’s work was getting done and they were showing up for meetings and not drawing attention to the fact that we were literally napping in the team room, nobody cared.

  285. Hermione Danger*

    One of the best parts of WFH is the mid-afternoon nap. Stretching out on the sofa for 30 minutes to snooze refreshes me and keeps me going. My afternoon nap keeps me sane and keeps me productive at the high-level I’m known for.

  286. Amelia*

    One of my first jobs my mom worked in a different department and had a lunch break that overlapped mine by a half hour. So she would go out and get lunch, a big hoagie and a bag of chips that we would split. I’d go down to her office to eat and while I was there she would take a nap if she needed one. Side note it was also on those lunch breaks where I read Who Moved My Cheese.

    If I need to I will take a power nap on my lunch break. If my office mate is out, I’ll turn out the lights, lock the door, set a timer and take a nap at my desk. Otherwise I recline my passenger seat back and nap in my car.

  287. AB*

    I’m still dealing with an employee who falls asleep constantly at their desk. He claims he can’t control it . He hasn’t seen a doctor in many many years but claims a sudden medical condition he does not know he has. We offered a later shift & he refused . We are willing to make accommodations for medical conditions but he won’t get a confirmation.
    It’s even more uncomfortable because he is the first person people see when they come in. And he gets very combative and miserable when woken up.

    1. allathian*

      Sometimes napping at work can be perfectly acceptable as long as it happens on the employee’s own time (unpaid lunch break, PTO, flextime), or even on the clock for very short naps (15 minutes at most) if it can be shown that the employee’s performance after the nap makes up for it, which it usually does because an employee who’s struggling to stay awake isn’t doing their best work.

      Sometimes napping is unacceptable, as your example shows.

  288. Hola Playa*

    In my earlier years of dealing with hypothyroidism as a junior staffer, which is a whole other messy AF thread, the only thing that kept me employed was driving to the next parking lot over and napping for 55 minutes in my car, shoving a sandwich in my face on the three minute drive back to work, walking briskly to my desk to Be Seen, then refreshing in the bathroom for a bit before barely making it to 6p. It was the most prompt routine I’ve ever had in my life!

  289. It Creates a Rage*

    Cubicle floor. Call center, so everyone needed to be productive all the time while not on scheduled breaks. Person who falls asleep constantly. Probably has a sleep disorder requiring accommodations but refused to request accommodation or provide documentation. As a team lead in the general vicinity, part of my job was to WAKE THE EMPLOYEE UP when advised by anyone they were napping again. Employee was always MAD and SNAPPY about being woken up. I was so glad to switch to remote in that job. Not sure what happened to the napper once I was absolved of the responsibility of waking them up. I have since left that company.

  290. alaskan bee*

    I bought a hammock chair and tucked it against the wall of my office and a little rocking footrest. When I need to nap, I clock off work and sit in my hammock. I have a pillow I tuck under my head and then I’m *out*. This is no 30 minute trip. We’re talking 1.5 hrs of glorious goodness.

  291. Uncool Tuber*

    I used to work for a medical device delivery company. Our field representatives were in and out of hospitals all day long.

    My office at the time was right next to HR. He talked loud, walls were thin, so I got to overhear a lot of conversations.

    Once heard him telling a field rep that “sneaking into an unoccupied patient room and taking a nap in the hospital bed was unprofessional and inappropriate.” I concur.

  292. Hola Playa*

    I once worked for a guy who was in his late 70s. At a place where older dudes would joke about themselves expiring at their desk because Work Is An Identity, apparently.

    I was a later arrival in this era of my career, getting into the office about 9a ish. I had a brusque email from this boss from predawn that morning, so I walked over to his office, and casually said Hey, Boss in the doorway. His chair faced away from the door, so I could see his computer and the back of his head (barely! he was a little fella) and his arms on the arm rest, but not his face. I called his name again and he didn’t respond or move. Once again, a bit louder. Nothing.

    I was soooo sure this dude had lit-rally perished at his desk. I finally got a coworker to go in there because I just could not. She was as sure he was as done as I was at that point!

    Turns out, he was alive and well with crazy hair and glazy eyes, yelling about he’s the only one who works around here, we should all have work ethic, et cetera.

    That gave my coworker and me some bonding fodder for a short while, though I was a wee bit disappointed that I couldn’t just finish a particularly cumbersome project without his micro-management.

  293. Meg*

    I have a direct report with a night job. Tuesday through Saturday he works 10pm-5am stocking shelves at a grocery store, while working for us Monday-Friday 8am-5pm. He sleeps for a few hours in between and catches up on the weekends. He frequently naps in the break room on his breaks and just sets an alarm.

    At first I was horrified but I had to do an attitude adjustment and focus on how it wasn’t my place to control his life outside of work, and just address it if it began to affect his work for us. Which, aside from the occasional incident of being 10 minutes late because he overslept (which I am also guilty of working one job), it hasn’t. So, I just let him work his crazy hours and make sure to keep an eye on his break times so we can wake him if needed.

  294. needs naps to live*

    I was hired to work as an apartment building cleaner one year when I was suffering from fairly severe unmedicated depression (I was about nineteen or twenty at the time). The location was a complex with four medium-large buildings about 90 minutes by bus from my house. I was the only person cleaning the public spaces and I was working part time so there was always an unmanageably large amount of stuff to do and my VERY helpful coping mechanism was to lock myself in one of any number of store rooms that had leftover carpet from their apartment renovations and go to sleep.

    Although I was never caught, I was let go after about two months because they “wanted someone full time” – I’m pretty sure it was simply because it was clearly impossible for me to get the job done on my own. I was fine with it – my first paycheque had been delayed by an entire month and the commute was killing me. I do miss the amount of time I was able to spend thinking about the writing I never did, though.

    (I also recently got a workplace accommodation that lets me nap when I need to during the day at my current job, which has been very exciting and by exciting I mean sleepy)

  295. azvlr*

    Very timely thread as I have recently been diagnosed with a sleep disorder due to an offhand comment I made to my primary care physician. I knew I had terrible sleep hygiene, but I had NO IDEA that part of my problem was due to restless leg syndrome (apparently it’s classified as a sleep disorder).

    I’ve always been so ashamed at my urge to nap during class, meetings, and when working at my desk. But on the other hand, not being allowed to give in to that urge is agony for me, and I’ll sometimes put my head down and be out cold (legit dreaming) for a five-minute power nap. I’m always terrified that I’m going to get caught and reprimanded or fired.

    Also, for years, I had been plagued with legs that always felt puffy (like edema, but not actually swollen) and achy, except the right amount of stretch was always just out of reach. And naturally, when your legs hurt, the inclination is to rest, which just makes it worse. Sitting all day at my office job was torture and my family was miffed that I didn’t ever want to sit around and play board games like they love to do. My leg pain would be better on my days off or during exercise. I never considered it as a likely cause because “restless” seems a bit of misnomer in my case. My legs don’t twitch (or maybe they do in my sleep), but they do hurt if I don’t move around.

    I never realized the two were connected. I’m now making an effort to get to bed earlier, and I’m taking medication that helps my legs not hurt, so I’m sleeping better. Now that I know I’m not just lazy and bored at my job, my morale is so much better. I still get sleepy occasionally, but I feel more comfortable grabbing a short snooze. I am considering getting it documented at work so if I do need to put my head down, I’m covered from an ADA standpoint.

  296. Not sure about the Statute of Limitations here*

    Two from my time in the Navy; I was a nuclear propulsion Machinist Mate on the USS Enterprise.

    In the #3 Plant Upper Reactor Auxiliary Room was a spot on the ventilation duct on top of an enclosed workspace that was perfect for a quick nap or reading non-work stuff. The access to the compartment had a door that would slam from the pressure differential between it and the compartment above that served as the perfect alarm for when someone would come down. You could then grab your clipboard and look like you were just in a place that couldn’t be seen from the ladder down. I grabbed many a quick nap there. It was known to every Reactor Mechanic in that plant, but for some reason the guys who got qualified Watch Supervisor conveniently forgot all about it.

    One time were in Hong Kong. Since we anchored out there, we had to keep two of the four plants running to provide steam and electricity for the ship, so we were on what was called ‘Steamers’ for the port call. The two aft and the two forward plant groups would combine to staff the operating plants while the other plant in the group was staffed at shutdown strength so we could get as much time ashore as possible. Since it was a steady state constant load, it was stultifyingly boring. I was on Feed Control in #2 Plant for 6 hours and stretched out on top of the reduction gear for a rest. When I woke up 2 hours later I realized that the Watch Supervisor had initialed my logsheets lying next to me while I was napping. It was never mentioned beyond a, “Don’t do that again.” at the end of the watch.

    OK, 3: At A1W Prototype There was a void inside the main reduction gear housing that was perfect for napping. It was warm (nice in an Idaho winter) with lots on constant background noise that would lull one to sleep. Over the decades it got well padded with rags and was used regularly.

  297. Pretend I'm Anon*

    At my very first job out of college the office had a bookable “quiet room” (preference was given to nursing mothers to pump). the number of times I booked it for a half hour nap during my lunch was wild. but it was a customer service call center job so what can you expect?

    my second job was in a mailroom where I was the only employee. there was a huge couch in there so I frequently napped during my lunch break. Now I work somewhere with no good place to nap but it’s a much better job overall.

  298. Chickadee*

    I’ll get occasional migraines where I become very light sensitive, dizzy, and stupid (can’t read, can barely think or speak), and it takes ~20 minutes for my migraine meds to kick in. Ideal solution? Take meds and lie down for 15-20 min. Fortunately my boss has been great about accommodations, including keeping a pillow in my desk drawer for migraine naps. :)

  299. Nope, Nu-uh, No way*

    Not me but a long ago coworker.

    During my college years in the 90’s I worked at boutique mall store as a part time sales clerk. One of the keyholders for the store was a very conscientious and straight arrow fellow college student.

    We were closing the store together on a slow night. Everything seemed alright with Coworker until after just after I locked the doors at closing time. I’d gone to the back room to hand her my counted down cash drawer and found the poor girl asleep on the manager’s desk with a pen still upright in her hand on the deposit slip for the bank!

    When I woke her up she was coherent but very groggy. She said she knew why she in the condition she was and didn’t need or want medical attention but didn’t explain further. She refused any other help. She was able to just barely rouse herself enough to complete her required closing procedures and call the store manager to give them a mea culpa about the night’s happenings all within our allotted hours for the night.

    By good fortune Coworker’s boyfriend (an athletic man and all around good dude) was her ride home that night. He wound up having to carry her in a princess lift to his car because she wasn’t able to walk straight.

    A week later we were working together again and she explao

    1. Nope, Nu-uh, No way*

      Sorry about the incomplete sentence. To continue:

      Coworker explained the extreme grogginess was a result of an attempt to change prescribed medication for a condition she had. The attempt had gone badly so she was back on the her old medication so it shouldn’t be an issue again. Given what I knew of her upright character I believed her story.

      I did ask her to please take more care with her health and be more communicative in the future if she wasn’t feeling well enough to work because she nearly scared the excrement out of me.

  300. Goldfeesh*

    I worked an on call job for a couple of years driving railroad engineers and conductors to their trains. It was always random when you’d get called up to drive so you could have been awake for an hour or going on 16 hours awake. The shifts could last up to 14 hours if I remember correctly. That job proved you could sleep anywhere. Drivers would nap in the provided vans, usually in the front seat. I got so I could sleep sitting four feet away from a train track with a train going by- only waking up enough to listen to radio dispatch to see if my crew were on the train or not, then quickly falling back asleep. The job was interesting, but less fun getting paid $10 an hour on call/no benefits while your precious cargo were getting paid up to $2,700 a night. You’d thought we’d be worth a bit more.

  301. Mel*

    Years ago I worked on a high rise floor with a large atrium – all glass walls with a tree inside, a nice place to get a quiet break. This one guy would go in there, face the exterior window, set up his laptop and place his hands so it looked like he was working. But he was taking hours’ long naps!!
    Apparently he had been written up several times for falling asleep in meetings and had a severe sleep disorder. Still, there are much more covert places to nap than a GLASS ROOM.

  302. Anon For this*

    Not me; but my coworker. She’s been busted sleeping 4 times. I gave her a pass the first time because everyone has a bad day. The next time, I asked my boss what he’d like me to do with a coworker sleeping in front of a window to our plant. He requested I let them know so, the third time I asked my boss to check on her and she was sent home, the fourth time resulted in disciplinary consequences. Normally I wouldn’t care, but the way our office is set up; everyone can see and I’d prefer to not be doing everything myself.

  303. KareBear*

    I had a co-worker that worked next to me over a low wall (you can easily see everything when you stood up) that was ALWAYS napping. I don’t think he ever did any actual work, every time I looked over he was asleep in his chair. Honestly I was impressed, he managed to stay upright in his chair and not really look like he was napping until you saw his eyes were closed. He had a reputation of being hard to work with, so people never asked him for help, which I think translated into him not having work to do! Thankfully I never needed to work with him, so I was saved from having to wake him up.

  304. AC*

    Years ago, I went to work sick (I know, I know) because we were so understaffed. Mid-day, I was at my breaking point– fever, chills, aches, etc.

    I went to my boss and said I needed to go home. My boss told me I wasn’t allowed to leave because of how short-staffed we were, but, as a GESTURE OF HIS KINDNESS, he would let me take a nap on the floor of a storage room before returning to my duties.

    In my delirium, I agreed, and writhed around on the storage room floor for about twenty minutes before dragging myself back to work.

    Needless to say, I called in sick the next day. My boss was very upset that I would do this because of how “generous” he had been with me the day before.

  305. sir pancake*

    I work for a large-ish tech company with a relatively casual culture. I’d been there a few years when my brother graduated from college and got a job at the same company. As luck would have it, despite the large size of our campus, his office was down the hall from mine, on the same floor of the same building. Shortly after he started, I was out of office on a multi-week vacation. Apparently, he started escaping his shared office to nap in my solo office, where I had a comfy wing-back chair with an ottoman and a throw pillow. Work can be pretty slow here when you’ve just started and haven’t been assigned to projects yet, so this wasn’t inherently a problem. However, at his first large-team meeting, which included management, he was asked to introduce himself and share a fun fact. His choice of fun fact: “My sister also works here and she has a great chair in her office where I like to go and take naps!” Everyone laughed it off and he didn’t suffer any long-term consequences (he’s still here two years later), but a few months later he was introduced to someone who said, “Oh, you’re the one who told all the higher-ups about taking naps at your first team meeting!”

  306. GoryDetails*

    Back in the early ’80s, I was working as a software developer at a large east-coast company – and had also just discovered a group of co-workers who played D&D. So we’d play the game at somebody’s home on different nights of the week (minimum 1 per week, maximum 3 – though I knew a guy who played in four different games per week, despite having a pregnant wife at home) and would sometimes/often stay up very, very late. So, I might wind up just going directly to work from whoever’s home we’d been gaming at, and would curl up under my desk in my cubicle for a refreshing nap. Given that all the software folk kept very… eclectic… hours, nobody really cared when you came in or whether you napped under your desk, as long as the code got turned in on time.

  307. Cardinal*

    Many years ago, I worked on a college campus. Our office hired a grad student one year to handle some overflow activities that the regular staff didn’t have enough time for. That woman was a marvel. She booked meetings all over campus, was invited to everything, and was always out and about doing her job.
    On her next to last day last day, we were that month’s host for a local business organization’s regular meeting, involving a lovely spread of heavy hors d’ouevres, wine, and beer. She was the organizer.
    Oddly enough, too much alcohol was ordered, and several of us ended up hauling all the leftovers, including a tapped keg, up to her office and proceeded to do our level best to finish it all. During that spree, she shared with us how much she had learned from working with us, how great the job was, and all of her tips for napping all over campus.
    She NEVER had any 9 a.m. meetings, despite her calendar being booked for one at least 4 days a week. Every single one was an excuse to leave her office and nap in random, out of the way hideyholes. Her favorite (although one I would never use) was the women’s restroom in the basement of our building. No women worked on that floor (there were 3 offices on that floor, all occupied by male professors who were basically retired), and she would just go into the restroom, lock herself in the shower stall in the back, and sleep with her head on the tile.
    Needless to say, the next morning all of us who had helped to kick the keg booked ourselves for 9 a.m. meetings. It was a very productive Friday!
    I miss her genius.

  308. Jellybeans*

    I do take a lot of naps, but I work a job (full time novelist and screenwriter) where I don’t have any kind of fixed hours or anything, and my income directly relates to the amount of work I complete – if I don’t finish a screenplay, I don’t get paid. So I can do whatever I want in terms of choosing how to spend my working day, as long as the work gets done.

    I else often stay up working till 2am or 3am (I’m a night owl by nature and my brain focuses better late at night) though, so I think I’m a pretty hard worker, despite the naps.

  309. sara*

    I worked somewhere where there was a shared desk built onto 3 walls of a small room. There were supports occasionally but it was basically a desk-height countertop. My coworker used to nap by lowering a few chairs so there’d be room for her on the chairs but fully under the desk.

    Mostly she’d nap at lunchtime but there were a few occasions she’s be missing for a few hours…

  310. But not the Hippopotamus*

    The only advantage i have ever found for being short was when I was dead exhausted in early pregnancy. I could push my desk chair and my office guest chair (a heavy non-wheeled one) together and take a nap on the resulting surface.
    stopped working once I had an appreciable baby bump, but that’s how I spent my lunch break during my first trimester.

  311. Gorse*

    I know this probably makes me a bit of an odd duck out, but I actually am of the very strong opinion that wellness rooms/maternity rooms should absolutely be available for people who need to nap*. The caveat here being that absolutely, breastfeeding/pumping moms should get first dibs. I’ve only had this situation at two of my offices, and the first one had multiple rooms, and the other, the room was right near my desk so it was pretty clear that almost nobody was using it at all. For some disabilities even, I do feel like access to a space of that kind could or at least should fall under a work accommodation.

    to be fair I also think that most office break rooms should actually have something besides chairs made of either plastic or the smallest, hardest cushions known to man, so. maybe if they fixed that, this wouldn’t be as big an issue. (before anybody asks about the possibility of my car, I live in a southern state so trying to sleep in my car during lunch/breaks is an actual health hazard any time from March to October, and sometimes even then).

    My only other comment about napping during work is uh. As somebody who lost two jobs in two years due to an inability to stay awake in the office, including very rarely but severely overnapping breaks at least once for both, if you find this starting to happen to you, especially if it hasn’t in the past, please take my MOST EMPHATIC advice and get your health checked and be insistent with your doctors about it.

    Take it from me and my nice shiny (relatively) new pernicious anemia diagnosis, both are whom are very lucky I did not crash my car during my commute during those two jobs. d(‘-‘d)

    1. Gorse*

      also this was a hell of a topic to come up on my birthday, given my job loss history and the story feelings I have on sleeping and offices because of it, lol

  312. KathyG*

    Two stories from my university days.

    1) I needed to pick up an Introductory Statistics class one summer. Summer courses cover the same material as regular courses, only over 6 weeks instead of 12. There was only one section offered: Tuesdays from 8:00am until noon, plus Thursdays 8:00am to 2:30pm with a 30-minute break noon – 12:30 (yes, 6-1/2 hours. of Statistics). Fortunately the classroom was in the same wing as the shared office where I had a desk, so I became the master of the 8-minute nap on those lunch breaks.

    2) Fall semester same year. Mid-morning class in medium-sized lecture theatre. One day, a bit of a buzz starts up around the room; soon every student is aware that one of our number, in approximately the middle of the room, is sprawled out over several seats (across two rows) fast asleep. Lecturer is apparently oblivious, droning on. After a few minutes, the sleeping student lets out a brief snore. Without changing his pace or tone of voice, instructor says, “Someone should get him a pillow.” Entire room of course erupts into laughter, which wakes sleeping student. Lecture resumes without further comment from anyone.

  313. judyjudyjudy*

    Ok, two second-hand stories:

    1. My cousin works fairly high up at a national lab. Paid summer internships for undergraduate engineering students is really competitive at this site. One summer, they were short on desks so one of the interns had to sit at a desk set up in a hallway, which is a bummer but not unworkable. The intern would fall asleep *every afternoon* at his desk, and everyone who worked in the building knew it because they would pass by him in the hallway during his naps. He must have been a deep sleeper because he did not wake up with all the “lookie-lous” strolling past.

    2. One of my friends in grad school worked in a lab where they had a “nap box”. It was a large carboard box, coffin-like, that was made cozy with blankets and a pillow. One grad student in particular would use the nap box daily to catch some zzz’s at work. The PI did know about it, and was fine with it.

  314. I spend all my nights at the museum*

    I have a coworker who told me (proudly) that when he worked overnights he’d arm the security system and wake back up to disarm it when people started coming in for the morning. He’s a terrible coworker and his work ethic is atrocious. He’s also the guy who got the whole place all smelly with his protein farts

  315. Texas Teacher*

    Retired teacher. Sub plans take a lot of work. That means teachers come in when they really should be taking off, bc working in a germ factory is hard. It wasn’t unusual for a teammate to take a nap during conference period or lunch. Their teammates would make sure they were awake to pick up their kids from specials or lunch.

  316. Navy Napper*

    This is a story about a nap, but also a story of not napping.

    Long ago, far away, I was an officer in the U.S. Navy. As an officer, you had a day job managing your division, plus, when at sea, a job standing watch on the bridge at various points during every 24 hour period. Our Captain had a policy that there was no napping during the workday except at meal time. Because of how our watch rotations were set up, you could stand watch 2am-7am, work a workday 7am-4pm, and then stand watch 5-10pm, before getting a “full” night’s sleep with another watch at 7am the next morning. But no napping, you slackers. Except at meal time. One week, I was particularly tired (more tired than usual? I was too tired to know). So I napped during the only time I could–meal times.

    When we pulled into port, I had a security watch that required me to walk around the ship. I was so tired that I sat down in an unmanned room and… fell asleep. Couldn’t have been long– maybe 15 minutes, tops. But I would have gotten in serious trouble if anyone had caught me.

    When we left port, I finally told the medic (we were too small for a real doctor) I didn’t feel great. He ran some tests and I spent the day hooked up to an IV. Not sure what the blood tests showed but he spent a lot of time asking me if I had a family history of kidney disease. Anyway, long story slightly less long, I had gotten mono and a superinfection (my tonsils were the size of golf balls), and because I’d skipped basically a week’s worth of meals to nap, I’d nearly thrown my kidney’s into failure. They considered me medevacing me via helo but the weather wouldn’t cooperate.

    The trip back to home port? Yeah, I napped the whole way.

  317. Tree*

    twice have I napped at work.

    the first time I had a 9.5 hour shift + 6 on Saturdays. welding. an hour from home. starting at 6am. I feel sleep by 8pm easily but I was still dragging. one day I fell asleep for a split second *while I was welding*. luckily my hand loosened on the trigger and I woke up, so I only had a little bit of cleanup to fix.

    second time I was working a mostly office job. I had tweaked my back and went to prompt care over lunch. they gave me muscle relaxers. “I assume no driving etc?” “oh no, this is basically
    nothing. you can take it in the car on the way back to work.” ha. I took a pill when I got back, and woke up with all 4 people in the office laughing at me. I think they had been discussing putting things on my head (I had stacked ketchup packets on one of them once, so it would have been totally fair).

  319. Msd*

    I was in an “all hands” meeting with about 100 people (pre COVID). The big big boss was giving updates on sales and revenue projections and basically just droning on and on. The guy seated in front of me nodded off and started loudly snoring. Giggles started going through the attendees. I finally poked him to wake him up which resulted in a huge snort. During the entire meeting I also got to stare at his butt crack which was perfectly framed in the gap between the chair back and seat. I can still picture it in my mind.

  320. pagooey*

    Years ago, I was in a long, tedious team meeting before lunch, and I was both hungry and couldn’t keep my eyes open. I did doze off, just for a moment, sitting upright at the conference table…but it was enough to dream, and what I dreamed was that I had a huge, delicious hoagie sandwich in my hands. I mean, Dagwood Bumstead would be impressed. So I opened my mouth to take a big, big bite…and woke myself up, still sitting at the conference table, but with my jaw nearlty unhinged like a snake’s. I don’t remember what kind of yawn/stretch/cough pantomime I tried to cover with, and my colleagues were too kind to say anything, but I can only imagine I looked INSANE. This must be at least 15 years ago, and my sister and I still refer to that kind of deadly meeting sleepiness/nap as a “Hoagie Moment.”

  321. Kat*

    I’m a waitress—dunno that any of this is interesting to anyone and I’m sure other people have funnier stories but I’ve always napped at work during my breaks working a double if I can. I function so much better if I can just close my eyes, even if I don’t fall asleep. Thanksgiving 2019 I was already pissed to be away from my family, passed out on some chairs in a back hallway and really infuriated one of our corporate chefs, though god only knows why he felt it affected him in any way. I was fully out of the way of anyone—I think he was just upset that somebody was getting to nap while he was working, meanwhile I’m sure he was making like 150-200k to my 60k at the time. It was a common norm for us to power nap during our breaks, I was not the only one.

    When I worked banquets I used to pass out in the linen closet on the floor sleeping on tableclothes. I used to work up to 18 hour shifts at that place. The dishwashers would kindly keep an eye out for me if higher ups were coming through.

    Also woke up once to one of my male coworkers stroking my hair. I cursed him out, told him it was the creepiest possible thing for him to do, and he just giggled. If I’d thought it was sexual I would’ve gone to HR, but he was just a weird closeted 50 year old gay man who I think wanted to prank me, so I considered it settled after I cursed him out.

  322. Nanashi*

    I’m in Japan, and in my company it is perfectly acceptable to nap seated at your desk during lunch break. Air conditioning might play a major part. I’ve also heard rumors about an employee who napped at his desk whenever, but wasn’t outright fired, just shunted around from department to department for months on end until at some point he left on his own.

  323. Azure Jane Lunatic*

    I have a delayed sleep phase, so I’m perpetually jet lagged if I try to keep a “normal” schedule. So I’m going to try and thread this.

    1. Azure Jane Lunatic*

      1. I was a teenager, and my sister’s violin camp overlapped with one of my cases of walking pneumonia. I had been assigned to watch the accessories shop table while Cait’s mom was away. I had to take my codeine cough medication at the noon lunch break. My mom covered the table while I took an extremely involuntary nap on the floor.

      2. A survey call center, outbound automatic dialer. I was also taking college classes and watching my housemate’s small child. On slow jobs with not many pickups, I would find myself nodding off. Mostly this happened without incident, and I was always responsive to the calls that I did get when I was randomly QA monitored. Except for the one time I came to awareness having just said “No, sir, the fleas on the cat in your doghouse do not count as children between the ages of 11 to 17” — and couldn’t tell if it was something I’d dreamed saying, something that made sense in the context of what a respondent had said to me, or (worst of all) something I’d actually said to another human being with no reason except that I was half-dreaming… I walked home sick.

      3. Same call center. I woke up for my 8 am Saturday shift around 11 with a fantastic headache … at work, presumably working the whole time, according to the notes in my own handwriting. I hadn’t been drinking but I imagine this is what a hangover must have felt like.

      4. Night shift, written tech support. It was too hot to sleep well during the day, even though my shift would have normally been congenial. I would go on my break, set an alarm, and faceplant in the very quiet break room for some closed-eyes time if not an actual nap. It was common amongst the night shift, and not a problem unless you were late coming back from break because of it.

      The next few are all from the same moderately-cushy Silicon Valley job where I was a relatively low-paid Wonder Admin to a large team of user experience folks. I was on a flexible schedule and allowed to set my own hours outside of a few mandatory coverage situations.

      5. Hot meeting room, mid-afternoon, weekly team all-hands; there were about 30 of us crammed into a room that had a table big enough for maybe 15, and most of the hour wasn’t relevant to me. I would nod off and jerk awake. Nobody called me on it. After I got a different health issue dealt with, the involuntary naps stopped.

      6. Once a month, I had an 8 am customer-facing meeting where I had to be on site, coherent, and ready to take notes. My commute was 35-45 minutes if I went early, an hour plus if I went late, and it helped if I was there by 7. So I would load my bags the night before, knock myself out with benadryl and melatonin, get up at my alarm, and show up early and disgustingly cheerful. (I shared my caffeine with the rest of the team, so they didn’t resent my early-morning cheer all that much.) Mid-afternoon, when the chocolate covered espresso beans wore off, I would clock out for a break, go down to the Wellness Room, and take a nap so I’d be safe to drive home. It was a quiet converted meeting room in a quiet corner of one of the buildings, and had a beanbag chair, some prayer rugs, and a couch. I’d fall over on the couch, pull up some white noise on my phone close to my ear, and use my cardigan as a combination blanket and eye mask. Once someone came in for prayers while I was waking up, so I stayed respectfully quiet and with my eyes covered while they finished. Another time, after my team moved, someone was surprised to see me in that building, but it was a small quad and my building’s wellness room didn’t have a couch.

      7. Another 8 am meeting, and I woke up at the exact time where it would be too late to get any more sleep, but I was still arriving at work disgustingly early. The morning beams of sun were just starting to glint off my disco ball as I badged the door open. I had a guest “couch” in my cube (2 seats of an Ikea outdoor modular lounge seat) so I laid down on that, propped my feet on my desk chair, and snoozed until it was time to start meeting preparations. The early bird amongst my team managers was startled to see me there at that hour.

      8. Low-echelon temp in Facilities, helping out with a corporate move on top of my receptionist duties. It was in Seattle, where I didn’t live, so I had shoehorned myself into a sleep schedule that allowed me to arrive on time, and relied on public transit to get me there and back safely. I warned my supervisor that I couldn’t stay too late because of how far out I lived, and that I would start to fade rapidly after about 7 pm. They were not quite prepared for me, around 7:15, to start acting literally drunk with tiredness, but I did get a lot of cube labels completed before that point.

      9. I was still more popular and productive there than my predecessor, who had repeatedly been discovered napping under the reception desk. She had waited out her temp period and was securely hired before she started napping on the job. They moved her to a building where she would be busier and under better supervision, and I got the slow building.

      Bonus: Before my partner was diagnosed with sleep apnea or ADHD, they knew that warm meeting rooms after lunch were their nemesis, and they chose to stand through a particular presentation instead of sit and possibly fall asleep. They were in their probationary period. One of the branch managers chose to interpret standing and fidgeting quietly as deliberate rudeness and inattentiveness. I still think they should be able to get that disciplinary action struck from their record based on the medical documentation of their diagnoses.

      1. Bear Expert*

        The pushing through deep fatigue, doing things while sort of sleeping is always wild to me. The notes and analysis you can’t quite trust because you don’t know when the analytics part of your brain really checked out. I have continued knitting while asleep multiple times and the results are astonishing in both positive and negative directions, sometimes in the same piece.

  324. Teacher Karen*

    My first couple years of teaching high school, there were rumors of another teacher on campus who would nap DURING his classes. I didn’t believe it until one day I saw that teacher sporting Sharpie graffiti on his bald head, done by the seniors in his class while he slept. It certainly made an impression on me, and 25+ years later, it keeps me awake and alert!

  325. Alison would be proud (of my boss)*

    I definitely have purposefully napped (with boss informed) and been embarrassed that I accidentally fell asleep (meeting after lunch when presenter was droning). But this is one that combines the stories above about folks who were tired while pregnant and those who fell asleep during training, and do one better. I was pregnant AND the trainer…
    This was around 2000 and I was a co-trainer (i.e. me and another trainer would split up the class units so one would teach a unit for a few hours, then the other would take over for a unit or two, and back and forth) for 3-5 day classes at a manufacturing company. It was classes on statistical process control, design of experiments, etc. (I’m a nerd so I loved it, but every class at least one student/collegue would joke in the post-class survey comments that we needed to provide caffeine IVs.)
    When I hit around 4 months pregnant, and I was not up teaching so sitting in the back of the room, I COULD NOT stay awake.
    So my boss called me in, and per my user name, I think Alison would approve: he gave me a very stern but fair talking to that falling asleep in class was not acceptable.
    But he focused on the way it was affecting the job/others’ productivity. It wasn’t that I wasn’t productive. I knew the material and there wasn’t work not getting done. I was just in “standby mode,” so he didn’t actually care that I was sleeping. But students in the afternoon had a hard enough time staying awake, so to see me in the back with my head down (or lolled back) was distracting to them learning.
    We brainstormed several alternates (ducking in an unused classroom for a nap at lunch, standing instead of sitting as soon as I felt sleepy, …) and I experimented until it was fixed. So he didn’t fire me (per our discussion, I needed to fix in 2 weeks or that would be the result), and I left that job a few years later under good terms.

  326. Another professor*

    I am a faculty member who struggles to sleep well… my first year as a faculty member, I snuck a yoga mat into my office and tried taking an occasional nap under my desk. The mat was not soft or supportive enough, so when I moved to a larger office, I went to surplus and found a very comfy easy chair that I requisitioned for my office. I keep a bulky sweatshirt there “in case I get cold,” but it’s primary function is a pillow. Now if only I could better position my fan to gently move air in the direction of the easy chair! (I want to note that I take maybe one 20 minute nap a month in my office. Given the extensive hours I work, I am absolutely not taking advantage of my employer!)

  327. Rainbow Brite*

    When I was teaching, a colleague of mine was once supervising a student teacher (college intern) in a kindergarten class. Being five years old, sometimes the kids would still need nap time, and it was her job to supervise the sleeping children. Most teachers would use the time to catch up on paperwork, drink a cup of tea, or just enjoy a rare moment of silence. Not this student teacher! The first nap time she supervised, she lay down on the floor and went to sleep right alongside twenty children! Needless to say, my colleague had to gently guide her in the way of some professional norms.

    1. allathian*

      I did the same thing, but I was 15, doing my first 2-week internship at a daycare, and the kids were under adult supervision at all times.

      I enjoyed the internship even if I was exhausted after every 6-hour day in spite of the nap. My classmate who was at the same place went on to become a daycare/kindergarten teacher. She ended up working at the same daycare we interned at some 25 years later. It’s a small world, because my son later went on to go to that daycare!

  328. Anna*

    I’ve napped twice at work. Once when I was a tree planter (industrial tree planting following logging) I napped under in a shady spot along the logging road. Of course, right then my supervisor came by on a quad so I woke up, confessed to napping, and continued to plant hundreds of trees that day. No harm done other than being embarrassed! The other time was when I was a dispatcher for a wildfire response organization in California. I was so utterly exhausted from a long overtime night shift, that I slept in my car in the parking lot for my lunch hour. Anyone in the parking lot would have seen me, but it was one of the best naps of my life and I was able to finish the day more alert.

  329. Sleeve McQueen*

    Our office is in a coworking space and just in the same lunch break this week I saw one person asleep at the table in a communal kitchen and one person asleep in a phone booth (a small one person space for online meetings). The weird thing is that there are heaps of lounges, reclining chairs and even a relaxation room – there are plenty of more comfortable places to sleep!

  330. M*

    My office and boss were super supportive of naps during both my pregnancies. During my first, I worked a splitshift so I could go home and powernap on my lunch. That wasn’t feasable for my second, but my boss approved the 15 minutes of admin time we got in a day to be added to my lunch so that I could go have a power nap in the office quiet room every day. It probably got me through an extra 2 months before I went on leave.

  331. StaplerKeeper*

    I worked at a company that had a mini baby boom over a few months so there were four of us who needed to pump. The office had a wellness room which had a futon, no windows and a lock so it worked just fine. Because we were all busy, we coordinated our schedules so we didn’t conflict. Over the course of one week, we kept finding the room locked and would have to change our schedules or use the bathroom or our cars. I had finally had it, so I knocked on the door loudly and called the phone in the room repeatedly. Finally hear movement, and a very sleepy groggy intern opened the door, took one look at me, and walked away without saying a word. I went to the one HR person, where I was told, ‘you don’t have a special right to use that room, he was allowed to sleep in there, you can use the bathroom.’ I told her she was wrong and there are many resources available about mandated accommodations. Then I called the state hotline for employment complaints. Later that day, got a company wide email about lactation accommodations and that no one else could use that room if a nursing mom needed it. Still took them six years to fire the HR person.

  332. Sleeps through anything*

    A few years back (before Covid) I shared an office with another supervisor. We sat at corner desks on one side of the room. The other side (behind us) had a walkthrough from the hall to the room both of our teams sat in. I was especially exhausted and not feeling well. I wrote a sign saying not to disturb as I was napping on my break, taped it to the back of my chair, and put my head on a balled up blanket on my desk and knocked out. A few people walked through or came to talk to one of us and my coworker just quietly dealt with them. It was much needed and luckily I was able to get enough rest to survive the rest of the day.

  333. Pink Geek*

    I worked in a shared office that had 3 desks but only 2 of us. At some point my colleague nabbed some couch cushions that were slated to be thrown out and put them behind the third desk.

    We’d take naps as needed and whoever wasn’t napping would cover for the other if someone came looking. There were days the only reason I was productive was a 20 minute nap behind that desk.

  334. MAOM7*

    When I still worked in the office, I would nap on my lunch hour in my car in the parking garage when I’d had a bad night’s sleep. My commute was long and it was dangerous for me to drive with only 4 hours of sleep, so I’d use my hour to nap in my car, alarm set so I’d wake up to go back up to my office. I had a blanket, pillow, and dark-tinted windows, so it was not a big deal. Headphones deadened sound from cars coming and going. I know for sure there were others doing the same thing. Now I work from home, I rarely get sleepy during the workday, and if I do, I just go take a walk or fix myself something to drink and get back to it.

  335. Hroethvitnir*

    Oo, I was thinking I’d only done it at university, but actually. When I worked in a tiny factory (literally 3 of us and I was the supervisor with a lush 6 month term) I was coming in early and napping in front of the heater because my partner started work super early.

    I… don’t know how I feel about that now, but it certainly only started after the dysfunction had started to get to me, so I suspect it wouldn’t be a question if I wasn’t struggling.

  336. Walk on the Left Side*

    Content warning: fertility treatment

    When I was undergoing IVF treatment, the hormone injections gave me terrible headaches. I didn’t respond terribly well to them, leading to having pretty high doses and long cycles, and the exhaustion plus stress plus hormone headache hit unbearable levels at least once. I was lucky enough to have an office, and in fact to have a beanbag chair in my office, so in one of my 30-minute gaps between meetings, I was able to close my door and sleep on the beanbag chair for a little bit. Pretty sure it’s the only thing that got me through that day.

    One of the embryos from that round of treatment is now my six-year-old.

    The beanbag chair took its revenge about two years later…but that’s a different story.

  337. Caffeine Monkey*

    I used to work in a place where there were two engineers to provide 24/7 support to a national network. The sort of network that would realistically need at least five times that number of people.

    The result was that, during our ‘on-call’ weeks, we essentially worked 24/7. We each had a sleeping bag under our desk and would try to nap between alarms.

    The CTO kicked up a fuss about it once. (Not the schedule – the sleeping bags and naps.) I burst into tears, screamed at him, and ran outside, where I proceeded to kick the building. Not the most professional way of handling the issue, but at least I got to keep my sleeping bag.

    (The company went bust a year or so later, and I was laid off with no severance. I learned NEVER to put that much work in again.)

  338. K*

    I used to live and work in Japan where long hours and face time is important – you need to be seen at work. However, napping at your desk or at work in general, is not frowned upon. Rather it’s seen as a sign you are a hard worker, in fact you worked so much you needed a nap.

    I was a teacher and the schools had locker rooms for staff. My schools locker room had a curtained section with a comfy couch – it was specifically for napping, if you wanted more privacy than napping at your desk in the teachers office would afford

  339. Brandi*

    I used to work in the back room of a large record store. We had a big stand-up packing table with a shelf underneath that was two-thirds the width of the table. There was enough room for somebody to lie under the shelf and a colleague, Gus, used to stuff felt backing fabric from old window displays under there to use as a nest whenever he came to work hungover and needed a mid-morning nap (at least once a week). One day when Gus was particularly ‘under the weather’ he laid down on the edge of the nesting fabric on the side where the shelf didn’t cover him so it was easy to see him asleep there if you walked round that side of the table.

    The store manager came in to check our task schedule for the day while Gus was asleep, walked round the table, stood with Gus at her feet and read through the list of bookings. My other colleague and I couldn’t keep straight faces and we were often causing mischief, so the manager didn’t take her eyes off us the whole time she was in the room, in case we were up to something. She even dropped one of the booking sheets on the ‘floor’ (on top of the sleeping Gus). She crouched down while keeping her eyes on me the whole time and picked the sheet up. She finished checking our schedule and left the room without noticing Gus asleep at her feet. He was never rumbled for his regular recovery naps.

  340. eXmaths*

    I used to be a teacher (secondary school). I never fell asleep in my own lessons, but part of my job was doing observations of newer teachers I was supervising or mentoring. One hot day I was observing such a boring Business Studies lesson that I couldn’t stay awake. The first time it was just my head nodding. The second time I woke up when my pen fell out of my hand and clattered on the floor. The third time I actually fell off my chair. Yes, all the students saw. I was embarrassed, the class teacher looked mortified. Nobody ever spoke of it.

  341. allhailtheboi*

    The best thing when I started my degree was my lecturers saying “if we notice you falling asleep in clads, you won’t be in trouble, we will check that you’re okay.” Very useful for me as an AuDHDer who falls asleep the second she’s understimulated! (Yes, my lecturers are aware of this.)

  342. Eeb18*

    Several years ago, my organization hired a new employee. The annual conference that my organization hosts coincided with his start date, and was in our home city, so he was asked to come to the convention center to meet the team and some folks in the industry.

    The convention center had a “staff lounge” where staff could have lunch/grab water and coffee while at the conference. There was also a couch there.

    The new hire spent a couple of hours at the conference, went to the staff lounge for lunch, and then took his shoes off and curled up on the couch for a nap! In full view of the other staff! Who he had just met! It was particularly galling because most of the staff had been up extremely early to work the conference, while he had rolled in at 9.

    This turned out to be the tip of the iceberg of weird things about this guy. He only lasted a few months but provided me with so many stories.

  343. Frantic Sloth*

    I took a temp job to cover an employee that had left suddenly.

    On the first day I was told that she was fired for gross misconduct because one lunchtime she’d gone back to her car and taken a 45-minute nap (they had an hour for lunch) and the CEO had seen her. To him, this was “unprofessional” and evidence that she wasn’t “committed to the company”. Her fellow employees, who otherwise praised her and said she did really good work, agreed with him. Uh huh.

    And, yeah, the culture of the company was very odd, with some very strange unwritten rules. I was offered the position permanently but turned it down. Didn’t want to get any of that type of management on me, it’s too hard to wash off.

  344. Caffeine Monkey*

    A previous workplace used to tell stories of a former employee who would go up to the data centre, clutching a handful of cables and muttering about needing to do some patching, then curl up in a corner and go to sleep.

    Nobody was sure why he’d never twigged that, on the wall of the main office, was the CCTV of the data centre. Everybody passing could see him asleep.

    That wasn’t actually the main reason he was fired, which says a lot.

  345. Jasmine*

    In Taiwan many offices turn down the lights 20 minutes into the lunch period and everyone pulls out a small pillow and puts their head down on their desk for a snooze. If you call the office you can tell you committed a faux pas because the person answering sounds groggy. Very embarrassing!

  346. Hideycat*

    A few years back, I was managing a small office based team when one of the staff came into my office to let me know another staff member was asleep under their desk. I go to the nappers cubical and sure enough, there she is curled up under the desk taking a full on nap, snoring and everything. When I called her name, she woke up and looked surprised that I was there. In that moment, I told her that I wanted to make sure she was okay, she said she was and got up and went back to work. I talked with HR later that day and ended up letting her go. Not unsurprisingly there were other issues with her work.

  347. Clara*

    A few years before covid caused the department to be outsourced, I briefly supervised a hospital scheduling department. I came from a different department and didn’t know prior to the promotion how much of a shit show the scheduling department was (I learned pretty quickly).
    When my predecessor left my boss and grandboss decided to change the essential duties of the position and give the supervisor all the little tasks that the schedulers complained about most. They somehow failed to realize that they were creating Satan’s Supervisory Role by doing this. I was regularly having panic attacks on the drive to work during this season, but I was newly pregnant and reliant on the excellent insurance provided by the job so I felt stuck.
    Because my boss was several steps removed from the hellacious tasks she’d assigned to me she wasn’t really aware of how much time they did (or didn’t…) take and I had a lot of autonomy. Our department was also housed in an old out building that had formerly housed a now closed and empty urgent care clinic in addition to the call center cubicle farm. All this combined adds up to my pregnant self regularly disappearing into hidden and abandoned exam rooms for a breakdown and a nap. I think the longest retreat I ever got away with was over two hours. I never got caught or even questioned… when someone couldn’t find me I think they just assumed I was on a bathroom break. I felt some pretty horrid guilt about the whole thing, but also recognize that I was just doing what I felt I had to to survive. I never went back after my maternity leave ended, and I’m pretty sure that’s one of the best decisions I ever made. Good riddance.

  348. Chas*

    I was once dealing with a lot of chronic stress at work and hadn’t been sleeping well for several days when we were supposed to have an online meeting with the company that was helping fund our lab at 4pm in the afternoon. I was so tired I decided to go to the closest work cafe for a coffee just after 3pm, only to find that it had already shut for the day. Instead of walking another 5 minutes to go to the next closest coffee place I just took off my shoes, put on some calming music and laid out on a sofa for a 30 minute power nap before the meeting.

    (And then when I got back to the lab, my boss told me I didn’t need to take part in the meeting after all!)

  349. Jasmine*

    Just remembered an experience an instructor shared:

    After training as a missionary many years earlier he was assigned to Vietnam. He was told that the local custom was to take a nap after lunch so the missionaries did the same. He thought to himself, I’m not a child! I don’t need a nap! After lunch he took his bag and went out to his territory and started visiting houses. At the first house he could see from the doorway that all the residents were sleeping on couches and chairs so he went to the next house. All sleeping. The next house….the same. Even the DOG was sleeping!
    So he went home and took a nap. After a few years he was called back to the US to be an instructor. He said he submitted suggestions to start a nap time at the school but it got rejected.

    1. Bear Expert*

      From various behaviors I’ve observed in various offices – yes, adults need naps. Or at least quiet breaks.

  350. Moira Rose*

    A bit of a warning, I suppose. I used to manage a fella who would randomly drop off to sleep during the workday. I would wake him up, and eventually I said something about how he should see a doctor.

    Well, he had developed T1 diabetes (it happens to adults!!!) and was exhausted from untreated high blood sugars. Now he’s on an insulin pump and is doing great.

    Falling asleep is a symptom. It might be nothing, but it might be something.

  351. Radiant*

    When I was younger I had undiagnosed (and when finally diagnosed, pretty severe) anaemia. I worked as a temp because it was during the ‘credit crunch’ and permanent jobs were few and far between for entry level post university. The bathrooms at our office were all individual rooms with the toilet and a sink – I would escape for 10 minutes to roll up my cardigan, sit on the closed toilet and rest my head against the wall with my makeshift pillow, just to get through the day. I felt pretty embarrassed for having to do this, but it was the only way I could manage.

    Now, working from home – my anaemia is much better managed but I do have some days where I am just pooped and can’t concentrate. I usually use part of my lunch break to go for a power-nap. It means I can be more productive for the rest of the day!

  352. AndMargarethe*

    My partner, formerly an elementary orchestra teacher, always had issues with students or other teachers coming around during his free periods to ask him to watch their class for a minute, help with practicing, etc. Since he wasn’t a core subject teacher, he already had a fairly irregular schedule with very limited down time and switching between schools midday. His solution to get some peace during his break? Napping in a bass case. Yes, it was basically a giant coffin, but it was fabric lined and cushioned, big enough to fit his 6ft. frame, and if he closed it, everyone would just assume nobody was in the room and leave him alone!

  353. CLC*

    So not a funny story— used to fall asleep at work all the time in my 20s. I wasn’t out partying or anything like that— I had an unhealthy obsession with exercise and barely ate. I would try to force myself to go to sleep at 9 and wake up at 5 for workouts, after working also working out after work. I would always wake up around midnight with my stomach growling. I also have a naturally late circadian clock and I was trying to force myself into a schedule my body hated. I’m also ADHD and was undiagnosed at the time. I drank a lot of Diet Coke to suppress hunger without realizing caffeine can make people with ADHD sleepy. It’s weird but unless I’m sick I haven’t fallen asleep during the day or at work or even come close to in many, years. Even when I was pregnant and suffering from extreme fatigue and insomnia I never fell asleep. But it was almost every single day in my 20s when I was engaging in this fitness obsession. I had good coworkers who would wake me up if a boss was walking by though so I don’t think I ever got caught.

    All this said I’ve had a few jobs where middle aged men would routinely fall asleep and think nothing of it. I had one public sector job that started insanely early in the morning for no reason and the 60ish guy I sat next to was always on time and then would shamelessly go back to sleep in his cubical, snoring loudly. There was another job at a small consulting firm where one of the owners in his 40s would fall asleep in every meeting and even fell asleep at a conference right in front of the presenter. Another slightly older guy also routinely fell asleep. In college I had an internship where my boss, in his 50s, would just be asleep in his office with a glass window and everyone thought it was funny. In fact, in all of these cases where middle aged men fell asleep at work it was considered a running joke. I don’t think anyone would see it that way for women even they are pregnant, going through perimenopause, etc. There is definitely a huge double standard when it comes to sleeping at work.

  354. Late sleeper*

    Thinking about it, I’ve had many jobs where it was perfectly acceptable to go for a walk, run, or workout during the day. It’s not common now, but 20+ years ago people used to take smoking breaks all the time. It’s weird that we generally view falling asleep or a quick cat nap at work so negatively when other things people do to refresh themselves is totally acceptable. As others have mentioned of course it is more acceptable for some people than for others.

  355. ThursdaysGeek*

    When I was in college I worked for a small boot store – the owner was my boss. On rodeo weekend, he got drunk and fell asleep in a chair out among the boots. Customers would come in, and I’d offer to help, but ask them to not wake him up. It was awkward. At closing, his wife came in, shook him a bit, said “the bar is closing”, and took him home.

    Years later, as an IT professional, I needed something from my boss, an owner of his company. I knocked on his door, and then opened it. The lights were off, and he was napping. I’d woken him up, so he helped me. As I was leaving, I asked if he’d like me to turn the lights back off, and he said yes.

    There’s many a time I’d like to nap, but I’m not an owner.

  356. EMP*

    This wasn’t my first job, but it was my first job after grad school. Between bad habits and staying up late to watch playoff hockey, I regularly fell asleep during meetings for the first 3 months I was there. I got my act together eventually and became a high performer but I’m still embarrassed by the memory and amazed no one ever gave me a talking to about it!

  357. Nap Me Away*

    I am in the lucky position of having an office with a door that closes and locks. I keep a yoga mat under my desk, and on any day I can, I lock my door, unroll the mat, and take a 15 minute nap. Most days are too busy, but I sneak it in whenever I can. I find I am much more focused for the rest of the day and often don’t need my second cup of coffee. I also use the mat to do my PT exercises during meetings where I don’t have to be on camera. Heaven.

  358. Inkognyto*

    It was decades ago. I worked Help Desk for a hospital. 8 staff when we needed 15. We rotated onto weekends doing overnight 12 hr shifts. The thing is staff rarely called overnight because the few things we could fix their greenscreens for was rare and we could not touch medical gear. The mainframe was often down for maintenance it seemed to need, especially on weekends. It took hours to come back up.

    I was literally trained to just crank the ring phone up and catch a few hours as most people did in order to handle it on weekend.

    Next to us was the ‘computer room’ where the giant mainframe and the computer operator (actual title) sat. They monitor the mainframe and all of the jobs that ran from it.

    The offices outside that were ours, with no door locks. I was in one and I cranked the phone up and went for a snooze. Except I had my cloak. This was a double layered 100% wool cloak that was massive heavy and warm. I loved it. I laid that sucker down on the floor and wrapped myself in it. I had tried to doze in the chair but nearly fell out twice.
    I awoke to the door being flung wide wide with my name being called. I jumped up startled.

    The computer operator burst into my room asking if I wanted coffee at 2:30am. I had laid my head down at 2am. I thought the building was on fire with how they had entered.
    He was shocked I was sleeping, I was like everyone here does it? I believe I replied “What you want me to do for 7 hrs. You bring the mainframe down and the phone literally tells them it is when they call in.”

    I got reported to my manager. She told me “Don’t do it again” and never let me live it down. She ever promoted me to higher positions.

    I found out later a long-time employee that was practically the supervisor flat out told her if she fired me for it, she would probably need to fire the other staff who trained everyone to do it. She was standing in the bigger room where 4 desks were, and said she didn’t believe him. To the shock of the others. He opened the cupboard that had 4 pillows and some blankets in it for like 15seconds look at her and then closed it again.

    I’m the only one that got caught, they still did it. Not me, I was in fear of my job.
    My last day of work years after, her parting words to me in a laughing voice was;

    “Don’t get caught napping!”

  359. Bear Expert*

    I have two!

    My first Real Job was in an engineering office – classic old style cubes, human height padded walls in dull neutrals, everyone with a little habitat of their own work style and preferences. (Well, I was in a 4 person bull pen cube as one of the most junior available nerds.) Some people would have mounds of big technical drawings and scraps of paper and prototypes, like a hamster nest. Some people would have stark, careful organization. Some people had Personality, pictures and figurines or whatever.

    And one guy had the comfy chair, insistence that he was not sleeping, and a snore that would shake most of the floor. He would also collect a fair amount of small, throwable objects that would land on him during the most disruptive portions of his afternoon naps. Stress balls, various vendor swag, the not good pencils that we wanted the supply cabinet to run out of.

    What impressed me was learning how this utterly wild thing to me – that this dude would take an obvious afternoon nap at his desk AND snore loud enough you couldn’t leave a coffee cup on the edge of your desk or it would fall off – was just an accepted part of the office culture. Jane liked her coffee black, Ed wouldn’t write with anything above .4 mm, Steve came in at 4 am and left by 1 pm, and we had rumbling vibrations going through the office for 45-90 minutes every afternoon, try to have a meeting in the far conference room or otherwise don’t plan any deep thought work. I don’t know if his work merited him creating a “can’t hear yourself think” zone of half the office space every afternoon, or if he had a medical accommodation, but it may explain Steve’s schedule, now that I think about it.

    This was the same place that had a principal engineer that would throw screaming fits and staplers at people and I stunned the office by telling him to go back to his desk until he could communicate appropriately with me and then we’d try again, and he actually did. I cannot overstate the difference in status and capital between my lowly position and an established principal staff engineer, it was like telling God to knock off with the flood. (He never pulled his tantrum schtick with me again and while my title didn’t change, my political capital increased tremendously.) So maybe they were overly tolerant of maladaptive idiosyncrasies in general. Or just painfully Midwestern, but I may be repeating myself.

    Hopefully less baffling and dramatic, in a later job I ended up with a health condition that caused fatigue, and that office had a quiet room with giant beanbags intended for casual meeting space – part of the high tech “we’re so cool and fun” aesthetic but was absolutely the napping room. My boss also smuggled me a comfy chair of my own (hard fought over leftovers from a previous office remodel that the facilities folks tried to confiscate whenever they found and the rest of us would rescue off the loading dock and squirrel away again) and I’d catch naps in my own little corner, in my own little chair.

    Personally, I think most business cultures could stand to add a naptime in the day. If I ever run a company, 3-3:30 is going to be unavailable. Like preschool, you don’t have to sleep, but you do have to be quiet and rest, I’m turning the lights down and the email server off. You can’t convince me anyone actually gets work done in that laggy mid afternoon lull anyway, it’s all coffee break and doodling in a meeting and trying to remember why we care.

  360. Napster*

    At a prior job, many, many years prior to being diagnosed with sleep apnea, I struggled with poor sleep and chronic migraines. I spent many lunches under my desk to get some relief or just a quick 20 minutes. I think only twice did I actually fall asleep, and one was because I was on painkillers for a back injury.

    I later got written up for this, even though it happened on my (unpaid) lunch hour. Such is life.

  361. seripanther*

    My first semester of grad school, I was working at an inbound call center, graveyard shift (midnight to eight a.m.). I had classes Tuesday and Thursday, several towns over. This effectively meant that I slept in my bed three days out of a five-day work week. I became a MASTER of napping at work. Had a little bed set up under my desk and all. Crawled out when the phone rang, dealt with the customer, went back to sleep. My teammates weren’t fussed, and no supervisor at that org would have been caught dead at work before eight in the morning.

    Parallel but opposite story from that job was the day they decided everyone needed an eight-hour team building workshop–directly after our eight-hour graveyard shift. By mid-afternoon, we were absolutely drunk on tiredness and giggling like lunatics. It was a miracle everyone got home safely. I wasn’t one of the team members who had to be BACK in the office eight hours after the end of the team building, but the ones who were, weren’t happy.

  362. Bozlymon*

    Relatively new at job(~1 year)… napping at lunchtime at my desk: headphones on playing music, phone alarm set for 1 o’clock for a teleconference meeting at 1… Yeah. Remember to set your alarm for 1 PM not 1 AM. Missed the first 15 minutes of the meeting -no harm no foul though so all good.

      1. Azure Jane Lunatic*

        Mine was in elementary school, where I’d crawled upstairs for a nap after a particularly brutal day. I woke up and my watch said 7-something, just about to be late for the bus. I scrabbled downstairs in disbelief that Mama hadn’t come up to check on me, to find everyone sitting around calmly. It was 7-something PM. My clocks have been 24 hour ever since.

        (Winter in Alaska, where 0700 and 1900 are both very dark.)

  363. Luckiest Napper Ever*

    I had the worlds best boss and he knew I was pregnant before I did bc I got pregnant exactly one year after his wife did and he recognized the symptoms day by day. He even bought me pregnancy tests and patiently convinced me to take one bc I was in denial.
    The man who always ate lunch at his desk started going home for 2 hour lunches so I could nap on his couch. And his wife gave me several designer maternity outfits. My husband was in medical school and I was our sole income.
    I was in a terrible accident between getting pregnant and knowing it. He hired an assistant for me; I trained her and she did all of the things I was suddenly unable to do. And he “made” her take 2 hour (paid) lunches too lol. He was a fabulous human being. And business grew so there was work for all of us when I came back from my paid maternity leave.

  364. Ladycrim*

    I take several medicines to keep migraines under control. One of them is only supposed to be taken at night, but every once in a while I have a brain lapse and take it in the morning. One day I did this and fell asleep at my desk. My boss walked by and shouted, “Wake up!” Believe me, I did. (Luckily she thought it was funny.)

  366. Elizabeth West*

    I often wish I could take a quick nap at work! It’s even more tempting when I’m working from home and I have a light day. I try to get enough sleep at night but sometimes I just don’t.

    The only time I actually got away with it was when I had Covid and was working from home. But I logged off when I couldn’t stay awake any longer–I didn’t actually sleep when I was supposed to be working.

  367. NYWeasel*

    When I was a young assistant, I was walking past the cantankerous VP’s office and he was splayed out across the desk, either napping or having had a heart attack. I quickly did mental calculations and realized that if he’d suffered a heart attack, I had no clue how to respond and if he was sleeping, the last thing on earth I wanted to do was be the person to point out he was asleep at work. So I scurried back to my cubicle and hid out, hoping someone more senior would deal with it. That didn’t happen but I eventually saw him emerge looking rumpled and grouchy so I thankfully guessed right.

  368. Dog momma*

    Wow, this took me from early this morning til now to finish all the comments.. Enjoyed it very much!

  369. Summer Day*

    Ahhh yes! A couple of decades ago my now husband and I were house sitting a colleagues mansion over new years. We were both rostered to work New Year’s Day so we decided to have a relaxed NYE BBQ for friends. Somehow… word got out… and it was definitely not the work night BBQ we had planned. The next day I made it till lunchtime when I had to succumb. Pre cellphones so mid nap I was paged… I responded but not being massively alert I couldn’t make head nor tail what the person was talking about so I pretended I was in the middle of something and asked if I could call them back…which was an incredibly lame excuse seen as I had called them. A few splashes of water on my face to revive myself and I managed to call back and make sense of the situation. The following week I was in a meeting and it was discussed how falling asleep at work was a fireable offence… I like to think that was coincidence!!!!

  370. Free Meerkats*

    Somewhere in the box of stuff I brought home from the office when I retired is a photo of a coworker leaned back in his chair, feet propped up on his desk with his dog in his lap, both asleep.

  371. Janeway, Her Coffee In Hand*

    Oh man, I have a terrible nap story. Working my first job out of college, I had been there for about a year when we had to do some kind of training. No problem, I took my notebook with me and wrote quite a few notes through the session, despite being pretty tired. When the break came, I put my head down and hit snooze for a few minutes while everyone else went to get snacks.

    Right as the session is about to resume, someone from HR comes hustling in and pulls me out. As soon as we’re outside the room, she tells me in this huffy tone “If you’re just going to sleep through the training, you have to leave”. I’m super confused and showed her my notes, saying no, I put my head down on break, I’d been paying attention all session. Apparently the lady leading the training got offended because she thought I looked tired and kept yawning while she was talking, so she reported that I was sleeping in class. Yet I was the only one who took notes?

    HR let me go back in, to many glares from the trainer. When it ended and I went back to my desk, my manager then pulled me into a meeting room to interrogate me over “sleeping in class”. Again, I showed her my notes and explained that I had not slept during the presentation at all. She kept refusing to believe me and I kept telling her to find out how many other people were taking notes, because I had looked around and I was the only one. How did I do that if I was sleeping?

    Nothing ever came of it, thank God. I quit and went to a new job a few months later. The organization was a train wreck and I kept seeing little things like that indicating how it was about to fully derail.

  372. stitchinthyme*

    My group at my first job out of college was divided into two factions. Half of them had been at another company that had been bought out by a larger one (our current employer) and the other half (myself included) had been hired after that. The ones from the bought-out company were kind of cliquish, like an old-boys’ club. Unfortunately our manager was one of them, so when a couple of the newer folks brought it to his attention that one of the other “old boys” frequently slept at his desk (sometimes snoring, sometimes with his face on his keyboard, resulting in long, sustained beeps), Boss refused to believe it. Until the day he happened to be around at the right time, and someone pointed out the sleeping employee. Boss grabbed a nearby trolley cart and RAMMED it into the guy’s cube wall, which obviously woke him pretty thoroughly.

    The sleeping employee was later arrested for passing bad checks, which was especially bad given that we worked at a bank.

  373. TGMC*

    AHHHH I HOPE I’M NOT TOO LATE FOR THE PARTY

    My interview for grad school was in person and also a working interview. I flew out for a day or two, helped on another student’s project (6-8ish hours outside in a cold drizzle), and had a one-on-one with my would-be PI. By the time we got to actually chatting about my potential project and fitness for everything, I was zonked. I started dozing off ***during the interview.***

    The thing is, my PI is/was not big on eye contact – and while he’s a damn fine scientific/technical writer and my idol in that regard, he’s a pretty dry lecturer. (By his own admission too, he would quip during presentations that he’s the ideal example of what not to do. ) When delivering lectures, he’d very noticeably be looking at one particular spot a bit above everyone’s heads, like the oft-given advice to pick a point at the back of the room to focus on so you don’t think about all those people staring at you. He does the same during a lot of casual conversations. So he didn’t notice.

    The funniest part is, some year or two later I mentioned it to other students in my grad office. Turns out that they’d all fallen asleep during their interviews too!

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