Horrifying Zombie State
On the run up to the executive briefing for a major grocery company, I found myself working 13-16 hour days. That included working over the weekend, and driving back to Pleasanton from SF in the wee hours of the morning.I arrived at the Pleasanton Hilton just in time to get some sleep before waking up Monday to work more than 30 hours in a row without any sleep. You may have seen 28 days later, or be thinking about watching 28 weeks later. Well let me tell you that while both of those are scary, 28 hours later isn't much better.
My coworker and I found ourselves playing chicken with the negative productivity zone, and occasionally we would break out into giddy laughter over something mundane like the "don't rock the pop machine" sticker. I'm not sure what my manager thought of all that, but he managed to retain his composure and let us get it out of our system. We were all huddled around a tiny desk in my manager's hotel room, my coworker and I having wheeled the chairs from our rooms over.
It was intense, and while a good bonding experience (comrade-in-arms), it was not something I would like to re-experience immediately.
In the end we were very successful, and it felt rewarding, but now I'm in San Jose (just ate lunch here at Don Don) doing another customer pre-sales educational activity. This time I will be explaining our programming model and how you can expose pieces using web-services.
Hopefully I eventually find my way back home. I ran out of clean clothing a week or two ago.
EDIT: Just ate supper with Dalban, we went to Gooyi Gooyi, and had the best marinated korean bbq I've eaten in a long time. Tomorrow I get a ride to Cupertino to sell my wares.
Labels: business trip, California
posted by Blight @ 6:13 PM
5 Comments:
I've had to do a 16 hour shift once. That was long enough. There wasn't a lot of laughter there as some machine broke down and we couldn't leave until we got it up and running and finish processing milk.
Glad that it was successful.
I think we were laughing from exhaustion and just how ludicrous some of the last minute requests from our manager seemed at the time.
Alls well that ends well though I suppose.
I think it cost me a bit of forehead real estate though.
Sweet. Yeah, I guess they kind of prepare you for that shit in University. I remember working on one project for over 24 hours straight, on ephedrine and Cokes.
When I went to the TA meeting the next morning I had to keep prying my eyes open because I was going to fall asleep in my seat.
You should buy me something cool in California. Like, uh, a fake palm tree or something.
I think we won the deal... which could mean a 3 to 6 month tour of duty in California.
Good or bad?
Good.
Even though, I suppose it would have been nicer to have that happen during the winter.
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