argus

As in, “aye, meh boy, ah been bernin’ eet”. Tonight marks a first for me: an all-nighter at work. As in not going home from the day before.

Off the bat I can think of a few negatives: obviously, you’re wiped out. But others: same clothes (Do they stink? No… Will people notice? Do I really care?), scarcity of food (Papa Johns across the street, 24 hour Ga Tech Kroger, the at-work snack store that I run… hooRAH), an exponentially deteriorating appearance (stubble, greasy skin, greasy-nappy hair, possibility of bags under eyes, etc.).

Positives: I get about 1000x more work done when nobody is here to come in my office and bother me, when people don’t call me on the phone and bother me, when I don’t have to go to meeting after meeting after meeting (who CARES what the customer wants it to do!!? WE ALREADY KNOW how it would be best!!). There’s a… a… I guess I’d call it a “thrill” factor, albeit a small one (doing something out of the ordinary, that will cause ordinary people to look at you in horror and shock and offer who knows what entertaining commentary).

But all of these things, good and bad, are short term. The longer term payoffs are harder to pin down. I’ve pulled some uber late-nighters before, and I can say from experience that allowing your eating schedule to get seriously smacked around due to such antics can lead to …unpleasant side effects in the days immediately following. So I hit Kroger about 40 minutes ago and nabbed me an apple for breakfast, along with a dozen Krispy Kremes. You know you’ve turned into a suburban wuss when you look at an apple and wish you had your goofy-handy little corer-slicer utensil.

The irony is that I don’t have what most people would call a tremendously important deadline looming tomorrow, or the next day. The next tremendouslyimportantloomingdeadline isn’t until December 8. We have an internal integration test tomorrow (run all the various subcomponents as they’re supposed to be run, together, and hopefully work out all the end-to-end bugs — I’m the task lead of one of the three subsystems), but I think most people would argue that such a routine test doesn’t warrant this sort of insane behavior. I can’t really explain it — some of it is wanting to tackle things that I just haven’t been able to spend time on. Some of it is just wanting things to “be better”, mainly cause my name is on this and that should still mean something. I’ve worked on projects with people who didn’t care about that aspect of the product they were cooking up, and I’ve learned this: doing an excellent job at a task matters to me.

And here’s a bonus photo for you die-hard readers: me giving my whole-hearted endorsement of my Imation 512MB USB keydrive.

Now I just have to make it through tomorrow/today :)

Current music: “Wearing and Tearing” — #57 (out of 74) of the songs comprising the Led Zeppelin studio album collection that I have available as an MP3 stream from my home machine (thanks to the phatty-cool streaming server edna).

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 18th, 2004 at 5:29:19 am and is filed under Work, WTF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.