BRISTOL, Conn. -- Ssshhhhh. Mel Meyer is sleeping on the job.
The salesman snoozes unashamed on his desk this wintry afternoon, even as the phones ring off the hook outside his door. Yet his boss is not aghast at Mel's siesta, not upset that Mel's hands are pressed lightly against his temples rather than wrapped around a receiver."Sometimes," the boss explains calmly, "Mel eats a big lunch."
Is this any way to run a business? The answer is more and more frequently "yes," as the workplace nap -- once derided as the refuge of the worthless and weak -- is embraced like a soft pillow by American businesses.
Meyer, aluminum products manager at Yarde Metals, rises after a quick 20-minute "power nap" and hits the office floor running. He contradicts his boss on one count; it's age, not appetite, that's responsible for his daily napping needs.
"It's like second nature," says the 63-year-old Meyer. "I just drown out everything. Without it, I'd have a tough time getting through the day."
For years, sleep experts have lamented that Americans are not getting enough ZZZs, that they reach for a second (or third or fifth) cup of coffee when they really need a blanket. Increasingly, corporate America is waking up to that reality -- even if some companies still feel compelled to hide behind euphemisms.
At Nike, employees have access to "relaxation rooms." The Kansas City architectural firm Gould Evans Goodman Associates features "spent tents," complete with pillows, blankets and alarm clocks. A Chicago public relations company has a "nap nook."
Other companies are more overt: Iowa-based health care provider Res Care Inc. has a nap room and a sign advising, "Napping in Progress." 42IS, a Berkeley, Calif., computer consulting firm, provides a loft with a blanket and alarm clock. Naps are divided into 20-minute blocks for its employees.
Attitudes are changing elsewhere. Rocker Paul Westerberg, once renowned for partying around the clock, recently told Entertainment Weekly magazine the most important lesson he could teach his newborn son.
"Learn how to nap in the afternoon," he advised. "You're going to need it for the rest of your life."
Even the city that never sleeps is getting a little drowsy. The Metropolitan Transit Authority, which runs the New York subway system and two suburban railroads, is considering 10-to-20 minute "power naps" for its train operators and bus drivers.
"Twenty years ago, the person taking the nap would be fired," acknowledges LIRR head Thomas Prendergast. The boss allowing the nap would find a pink slip, too. But safety concerns have changed that thinking; at least three other railroad companies already encourage napping to prevent nodding.
The pro-nap crowd, which celebrates National Nap Week this week acknowledges they face widespread disdain over the workplace snooze. This, they complain, despite statistics showing the typical American collects an annual sleep debt of 500 hours, that a typical person awake from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. physically benefits from an afternoon nap.
"There was definitely a stigma to it at the beginning," says Mel's boss, Craig Yarde, the head of Yarde Metals. "But now, people are looking at us as cutting edge. We've gone from insane to practical."
And all, he says, in just two years.
William Anthony, a Boston University professor and the self-proclaimed Napmaster General, believes the nap is an essential part of any healthy lifestyle -- sort of like Wonder Bread, but with a wake-up call.
"One thing we stress: you're taking a nap at the job, not ON the job," says Anthony, who is currently at work on a book about workplace napping. "It's like a smoke break, or a lunch break, or going to the gym. I think once people understand that, they'll be a little less antagonistic."
Anthony acknowledges his own lifestyle embraces the nap; he's a somnolent Don Quixote climbing inside windmills for a quick 40 winks. He fights against our "nappist society" -- a society where people are "caught napping" or "stealing 40 winks."
He urges surreptitious nappers to come out of the closet, or the locked boardroom, or wherever they are catching some shut-eye at work.
Anthony's mantra: "It is time for nappers to lie down and be counted!" One of his goals: Getting the first Monday after daylight savings time ends designated as "National Workplace Napping Day." He dreams of workers making up for their lost hour of sleep at their offices.
Sometimes the dream occurs during one of his own naps.
Anthony can rattle off a list of history's greatest nappers: Johannes Brahms, who snoozed while writing his famous lullaby; Napoleon Bonaparte, who allegedly caught mid-battle naps; Winston Churchill, who claimed a mid-afternoon respite provided him with "two days in one"; John F. Kennedy, who insisted on 45 minutes right after lunch; and Thomas Edison, who nodded at the workbench between inventions.
The cat naps for the Wizard of Menlo Park are somewhat ironic; his invention of the light bulb is cited by nap-ologists as one of the darker days in sleep.
Before the light bulb, people slept nine hours per night. Times have changed, and not for the better: the Washington-based National Sleep Foundation found last year that 64 percent of all Americans get less that eight hours of sleep per day, while another 32 percent get less than six hours.
The survey also discovered that:
-- Sixty-one percent say their decision-making suffers after a bad night's sleep.
-- Thirty-seven percent say daytime drowsiness prevents them from doing their best work.
-- One of five workers outside the 9-to-5 world -- 5 million folks -- regularly fall asleep at work.
"Insomnia and sleep deprivation is costing American companies $18 billion a year in lost productivity," says Darrel Drobnich of the Sleep Institute. "I have a slogan: 'Be productive. Take a nap.' "