[enomar]

In college, I worked 2nd and 3rd shift doing tier 2 tech support at an ISP. I spent most of my time doing my CS homework. The guys working 1st shift didn't have that luxury.

Not sure you'd find the same thing...just another data point.

[aminuit]

This is a pretty good idea. You could probably even get a night or weekend shift in a NOC for a small to midsize ISP if you have the networking chops. It usually goes something like this: wait for alarm from monitoring, run a few circuit tests, call upstream provider so they can tell you that they are working on it, inform customer, repeat. On an uneventful night, you can end up with quite a bit of free time.