Still, the impediment fazes few of the diehards who come out to play on the lobster shift.

Soon he was juggling dusty videos like a supermarket stocker working the lobster shift.

What is most surprising about the lobster shift is that the quality of concentration does not demonstrably diminish deep into the night.

He was a general assignment reporter, manning the Globe desk at Boston police headquarters overnight on the "lobster shift."

A desk sergeant stage-shouted “Good evening, Mayor,” and the half dozen officers who were preparing gear for the lobster shift looked up with a start.

And at least one defense lawyer, Xavier R. Donaldson, lamented the passing of the lobster shift.

"I can't tell you how many times I've seen grown men in tears," said Stephen Nowicki, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority police officer who works the lobster shift.

Nationwide, one in three parents with young children holds a job that requires early morning, late night or even lobster shifts, according to a national study two years ago by the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Manhattan.

Any other shift shall be a lobster shift and the lobster rate shall be paid, and members on such a shift shall be considered to be lobster shift workers.

He works nights selling condoms to prostitutes on the West Side, and he is one of the few people who has reason to be unhappy about what Judge Gustin L. Reichbach did when he was working the lobster shift.

Prisoners of the lobster shift who have trouble staying awake, tourists who have lost their luggage and need shampoo, nervous barbiturate users who forgot to fill their prescriptions during the day and Cher - they all find comfort at Kaufman's.

Union organizers at the theater, at 253 West 125th Street, said that stagehands had been working without a contract since September, that they were not paid extra for working the lobster shift and that management had discriminated against them for union activities.

By the 21st century, the lobster shift (the name comes from an old newspaper term whose origin is unknown) had become a relic of the 1980's and 1990's, when the number of misdemeanor cases soared, in part because of the Giuliani administration's crackdown on petty crimes.

Even though that number is low compared with what it was a few years ago when 100 or more cases was the norm, Justice McGann said the lobster shift had accomplished something useful: "Each person arraigned tonight is a case that will not have to be handled later."

Those of us in the MSM - that's the superannuated, archaic mainstream media - have our own jargon, of which the first sentence of an article is the lede, the early edition is the bulldog and the guys working into the wee hours make up the lobster shift.

His lobster shift found him coming to the broadcast center between 4 P.M. and 7 P.M. Meetings and studio work kept the prime-time crew working until 5 A.M. McCarver and Zahn's segments were not always shown on the air in the order that they were taped.