At four in the morning in Ann Arbor, after the bars have all shut their doors and dorm room lights go off one by one, it’s easy to assume that all have settled down for the night.

But amid the darkness, a few solitary lights remain: The florescent lamps of a third floor office in the Michigan Union; the headlights of a white commercial van driving down Washtenaw Avenue, making its way toward the Medical Campus; the pilot light of a large industrial stove in the kitchen of the Hill Dining Center; one flashlight finding its way through the dark basement of the South Quad Residence Hall during a security check; another one identifying the face of a worried driver pulled to the side of the road.

These are the lights of Ann Arbor’s 4 a.m. workforce — the graveyard shift, the midnight mavens. Though their efforts often go unnoticed, they’re the ones who keep campus running when no one else is looking.

These are their stories — the backwards sleep cycle, the compromised social life, the sacrifices made to work a second job to pay one’s way through school. This is the life of the 4 a.m. workforce.

Bagel Delivery Man -- by Hannah Wagner

The Westgate Shopping Center, about 3 miles west of the University’s Central Campus, looks dead at 11 p.m. The parking lot is void of cars and eerily quiet. The storefronts of T.J. Maxx, the public library and Nicola’s books are dark, empty and locked. Another tenant, Barry Bagels, is no exception. Inside the unlit bagel store sits a few rows of tidy tables and chairs and a metal rack neatly stocked with bags of chips. The neon sign on the front window is no longer glowing — the power is switched off.

At first glance, the darkness of the early morning hour hides any sign of life. But inside, three employees are hard at work.

Washtenaw Community College student Dameon Holmes, a fulltime bagel delivery man for Barry Bagels — a retail and wholesale bagel store with locations in Ann Arbor and Ohio — is sorting bagels for delivery with Lamar Hopkins, a student at Concordia University, and Jeff Schwerin, the wholesale manager who has worked at Barry Bagels for 17 years.

The three have a long night ahead of them — they work from 11 p.m. until 7 a.m., delivering nearly 7,000 bagels throughout Ann Arbor and the surrounding communities.

They arrive at the store just as the baking crew finishes its nightly production of 546 dozen bagels. Now the bagels have to be separated into groups by destination.

In all, the sorting process takes about four hours and the men work quietly and efficiently. Every so often someone will make an inside joke and the whole crew will emit a hushed chuckle, but then quickly return to work. Despite the quiet, they seem awake and concentrated on their efforts.

After Holmes bags the bagels for his 25-stop delivery route, he loads them into the back of one of the three white vans parked out back and begins his two and a half hour expedition. Holmes delivers bagels to all Ann Arbor locations — University buildings, Alpha Chi Omega sorority, the three downtown Espresso Royale locations and other local cafes. The two others deliver outside the downtown Ann Arbor area.

First stop: the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center. Holmes pulls into the circle drive in front of the hospital, turns his hazard lights on and grabs four bags from the trunk. He leaves the van running and hurries through the glass front doors.

After scanning an ID card on a digital reader, Holmes turns a few corners and hops on an elevator. Exiting into a waiting room, Holmes rounds a few more corners and leaves the bags on a long, empty counter.

“The hospital is so quiet at three or four in the morning,” Holmes says. “You’re half awake and you think you’re seeing things. You just try to get in and out.”

Though Holmes says the hospital is by far his most unpleasant stop, he considers many of the others on his route to be just as isolating because they require him to venture into some of the most remote areas of residence hall basements.

Holmes tries to maintain an efficient schedule in an attempt to shorten his nights and avoid long stretches in the empty basements.

“I have a routine where I get in at a certain time and out at a certain time,” he says. “You get on a certain schedule.”

Holmes supplies bagels for all the University residence hall cafeterias, and inside the Mary Markley Residence Hall he encounters his first human interaction since he departed the bagel shop’s parking lot hours earlier.

Setting his bags on a cold cement floor, Holmes surrounds them with red crates to alert the collectors of their location and prevent them from being mistaken as trash. While he does this, a woman peeks out of a set of double doors to say hello.

Holmes doesn’t see many people during his shift, but he says “everybody (I encounter) is friendly because you’re all on third shift,” he says.