On Thursday night/Friday morning, I had to pull an all-nighter. It BLEW. I haven't pulled any all-nighters since my days at the law firm. But on Wednesday I got handed this project that I thought would take me 4 or 5 hours instead of the 13 it ended up taking me. At first i thought the project would be kind of fun because I'd get to show off my Excel skills, and as many times as I've whipped up fancy spreadsheets, I still get a thrill from entering formulas and macros. Well at the 4th hour, this project officially changed from fun to absolute suckfest of all time.
Unfortunately, I seem to be one of those people who seem to be fairly resilient to lack of sleep. This might sound great to all the over-achievers out there, but it has neither helped me over-achieve, nor even just stay caught up with all my shit. It just allowed me to earn oodles and oodles of overtime and gain tons of weight. That was one of the first things I realized about staying up late: the more hours you're up, the more you eat. I get the munchies pretty often, but I usually need something extreme in flavor, like really salty, really sour or really sweet. And unfortunately, the most flavorful foods tend to be the fattiest.
The funniest story I have about one of my all-nighters at my job is when my coworkers actually called security because they thought I went missing. It was 6 in the morning, and me and two others had been at the office all night. I was sitting at one of the computers in our bigger caseroom, when all of a sudden, I heard
"Terence, Terence, where are you?!?"To their credit, I had been known to doze off on our many all-nighters, but they were all in my office. So I'm not quite sure why they were prepared to do an operation out of CSI to find me.
"I'm right here, dumbass," I replied.
"Oh my god, we thought you were missing! We thought maybe you fell asleep in the stairwell."
But the difference with this overtime is that I did it at home rather than at the office. Like I've mentioned before, the nature of my current job (I pretend that I'm computer-saavy IT person; hopefully my company never finds out how dumb I really am) allows me to work from home once in a while. So I sat down at my desk on Thursday night around 9PM with coffee to my right (far away from my computer so this wouldn't happen again) and lists of pointless numbers and documents to my left. I had to sit at my desk because I left my work laptop at the office, which meant no sitting on my couch and not getting anything truly significant done. Unfortunately, I'm a feng shui novice, and the position of my desk and desk chair have my back facing the TV.
After 5 hours of work, I realize that I'm nowhere close to being done. I'm sufficiently wired to keep on going, but my annoyance level is rising dramatically. Why the hell am I spending all this time fixing the client's work?!? How come I don't get paid overtime?!? I plod through, and before I know it I see the sun rising. Still, this project took me well PAST sunrise till freaking 12 noon. At the end of my long drawn out all-nighter (and all-morninger), I had that sense of euphoria, delirium and lightheadedness that can only come from a well balanced combination of caffeine, irritation, fatigue, and sense of accomplishment.
At 1:00PM on Friday, I was officially done and sent off my final product to the client. I was getting my second wind, but I knew I needed to sleep. Before going to sleep, I turned on the TV, and The Lake House was on. I defy you to start watching this movie and not finish it. So instead of going straight to sleep, I continued my caffeine-induced state for a couple more hours.
1 comment:
The Lake House was playing on the last plane ride I took. I really got into it, but alas, I was on the plane with the Boy and he kept talking to me. I felt too ashamed to say, "Shhh!! I want to hear what Keanu has to say!" so I missed most of the movie...
Post a Comment