March 2005 Archives
The project has officially ended. For the last four months I have been testing software and shockingly, I loved it. The hours sucked. And it's profoundly unglamorous work. I had no life. I saw The Honey once a week, if I was lucky -- and we live together! I've been working like a whip-driven ox (the red thing up there is, in fact, an ox).
Yet, I worked with a great team with a terrific sense of humor, the resulting product is quite spectacular (a nifty tool to work with digital images) and I actually felt like I contributed a great deal to the project. The free lunches didn't hurt either, though there seemed to be a tad too much fried food. The project culminated with 20 of us pulling an all-nighter to get the software launched. One person snored through the entire 8-hour conference call...It wasn't smooth sailing, but it was ultimately a success. We guzzled champagne and Irish Whiskey at 8am and hobbled home. As one of the developer said, "We're done like dessert."
Now I feel a little lost. These kinds of schedules aren't healthy in the long term, and can definitely wreak havoc on personal relationships outside of work. But I can see how it gets addictive and it's a bit like the Stockholm Syndrome where you start sympathizing with your captors -- at some points I actually wanted to work more. Crazy.
I'll have a lot more free time now and will be able to do all the things I've been neglecting. Like laundry. And reading. And updating this journal section. And most importantly, catching up with the people that matter most. But first, I must go and recover from my all-nighter.
So. Now the deadline has been extended to March 14th, and I am facing at least another 5 days of this insane schedule. I'm noticing that my archive pages are weird and not behaving properly...must investigate this...
In other news, a good friend of mine just got engaged and I'm making plans to go to the wedding in New Zealand. Very excited. Perhaps I'll even try bungy jumping again. At the original bungy jumping site in Queenstown, NZ, I flung myself from a bridge about 140 feet above a whorling, menacing river. Things I will NOT do this time:
1. Wear contact lenses
2. Wear a white t-shirt with undergarments that don't fit quite right
3. Watch the video tape of myself bungy jumping
