Some futuristic/scifi/dystopia fic I'll never write: We call them "cycles" due to the extreme variants of shifts. "Days" even as a colloquial concept of "the time between sleeping" become meaningless for those of us who are awake when calendar days transition; not to mention that depending on which zone we are in we may be using a different calendar (and nobody cares about the universal one).
What happened prior to the most recent sleep is "yesterle" (yester-el) and what will happen after we sleep now is "cymorrow" (sorrow), a linguistic joke I don't think I will ever fully tire of.
Of course, the current waking period is referred to as "c-cycle" (the current cycle), a very purposeful decree I believe was to make everyone angry at the linguists when you take the rest of the prescriptive words for our people into account.
