Anyone who reads this blog with any regularity – and I thank all four of you – knows that some stagehands have early calls. It’s not unusual for us to be up at 3 or even 2 am to go to (or be at) work.

When you have to get up that early, you tend to do some things the previous night to buy yourself another few moments of precious sleep. One thing I do is lay out my clothes the night before so I can quickly get dressed in the morning.

It’s complicated by the fact that I lay them out in the bedroom, where Mrs Nailbanger is sleeping. I suppose I could lay them out in another room, but I don’t. What I do, as a result, is get dressed in the dark, either by feel or the light of my phone.

Occasionally something doesn’t feel right, and I have to strip back down to reverse something.

Never before, however, have I done what I did the other day, which was make it all the way to work and halfway through the day before realizing that I was wearing a button-down shirt inside out. The collar was up the way it should have been, but the buttons were on the inside, tags hanging out, the whole gigantic embarassing bit.

I finally figured it out when my hand hit a tag on the side of the shirt. While I was crossing the street on a coffee break. Five hours into the day.

As a testament to how tired and busy we all are, an entire studio full of stagehands – who are so observant they’ll pick up the slightest thing to bust your balls over and then milk it for DAYS, and with whom I was working in close proximity for the whole time – entirely failed to notice. Thankfully.