Sic semper tyrannus! 🙂
A while back now there was a movie out. It’s not a movie I actually saw, I just caught the adds for it, played incessantly during prime time. It was some kind of chick flick featuring an ensemble cast playing a mother and her daughters or a bunch of sisters or a group of childhood friends or an exclusively female cult or something all coming to terms with their complex lives and relations with each other. You know the kind of thing, it usually stars either Sandra Bullock or Michelle Pfieffer.
Anyway, a recurrent theme in this movie (to judge by the adds) was one or other of the cast talking on the telephone, getting annoyed with the person on the other end, then repeatedly and viciously smashing the earpiece against a convenient table or benchtop. BASH! BASH! BASH! BASH!
The reason I mention this is that I’ve had the kind of week where screaming down the phone then smashing it against the desk until it broke into tiny little pieces would be a wonderful stress reliever. Regardless of whether there was someone on the other end or not.
I won’t go into details, all I really want to do is go to sleep and not wake up for… two or three months would probably do it. But suffice to say I’ve been working on one of those projects that’s so insanely massive that no matter how much effort you put in it never seems to get any smaller. And to make matters even worse, it’s got a completely non-negotiable deadline swooping down on me – talons extended – like a harpy eagle, and I’m an overworked keyboard monkey on an exposed branch.
As if this isn’t enough the client keeps adding minor changes – that is to say changes that appear minor (like changing the background colour of a page, or moving a heading by a few pixels) but in fact require hours of re-working. They’re so fiendishly devised to require the maximum amount of effort for minimum effect that I’m starting to suspect he’s in league with some sort of diabolical cadre of evil web designers committed to my ultimate downfall. Thoughts like this seem perfectly rational when you’re working ten hour days and drinking way to much Red Bull (ie: any at all).
Things really came to a head when I arrived at the office this morning at 8:00am. Someone usually turns up to disable the alarm system at about 8:15, but not today! I had to sit around outside until 9:02 before one of the sluggards we rent a room from decided to turn up. And I’d already had a Red Bull, so my usual casual and relaxed demeanor was coming under severe attack from frenzied legions of caffeine, taurine and glucuranolactone molecules. Needless to say, I was not a happy web designer.
So, if you haven’t heard from me for a while, and don’t hear from me before mid October, I’m not dead. I’m just horribly horribly overworked and strung out on cattle-urine derived amino acids. What a world! What a world!….
PS: I’m sure many people will have seen these rather unfortunate URLs by now, but hey, who am I to refuse a ride on the latest pop-cultural bandwagon?
http://www.powergenitalia.com
http://www.gotahoe.com
http://www.classicalbums.co.uk
http://www.ringtoneshits.com
http://www.expertsexchange.com
Oh what a difference a hyphen could make! 🙂
