Wot happened to the night shift.... 
I can contribute to this 2 days out of 8 now.
My night shift :-
Started at 19:00 and had 10 flights to get out by 20:15. Unfortunately 9 of those flights were late coming in so I sent the last lot of bags out (for the Ibiza flight) at 20:45. All my staff finish at 21:00 so it was down to me to collect all the empty luggage barrows to prepare for the first wave flights in the morning. After collecting the barrows from everywhere else, I went back to stand 105 at 21:30 to collect what I assumed would be 3 empty barrows. Not so! They were still sitting there, full of bags and the plane was in darkness with no sign of anything happening. Hmmmm...a mild panic set in at first as I questioned whether I had sent the bags to the wrong stand, however, I quickly dismissed this as I would have had the loaders from "the Ramp" ringing me to know where the bags were. So I rang the Ramp and asked what was going on. It turned out that the plane was waiting for crew to arrive from Luton and it wasn't likely to depart for another 2 hours. I bet that was a fun flight...
Satisfied that I could do no more for now, I returned to the baggage hall and cleared all the "twighlight bags" (bags checked in the night before an early morning departure) and then went for a couple of ciggies. The duty manager and Line Controller from the South terminal arrived shortly after and we ordered an Indian takeaway and sat down to watch the film "Focus" (not bad). Following the Indian, we were called by the Ramp who were desperately short of people to offload all the incoming late flights, so the 3 of us went out and did 4 offloads which took us through to 02:15. A couple of ciggies later and the first of our 03:00 starters arrived, closely followed by 2 more. From then until 07:00 ws just a blur of bags and then the cavalry charge of getting getting 11 flights out between 04:55 and 05:30. Then I went for a couple of ciggies while another Line Controller looked after the next batch of flights, then I went back and sent 4 more flights out before I was relieved by "Porn Star Steve", the Line Controller who starts at 07:00.
Now I am at home, drinking Cobra
