August 21, 2000 — Stop me before I say too much

Now, any Saves the Day listeners in my readership will be saying to themselves, "Saves the Day quotes, from the same song, and on consecutive days? Doesn't Greg own any other CDs? And doesn't he have a creative bone in his body?" But trust me when I tell you that today's quote is actually quite relevant.

So then. Today was to be my last 5:00AM wakeup (perhaps it truly was, but I'm not going to hold my breath), and it turned into a rather epic day. I got to work at 6:45AM, and worked fairly solidly until 10:30PM. I only took 20 minutes for lunch and 40 minutes for supper, and I didn't get home until 11:15PM, so it's been a very long day.

In case you were curious, I ended up staying at work so long not because I had to finish the project I was talking about yesterday, but because people kept sending me other little projects that I was supposed to make changes on. It was horrible. One form that had been unchanged for six months and was due to go online today all of a sudden found itself in need of an overhaul. Bah.

I did manage to more or less finish everything up, though. I work a lot better once everyone has left and I can play music loud enough to be audible on other floors (someone on maintenance actually came down to see what the ruckus was). I was feeling more than a little bit delirious by the time 9:00PM rolled around, as this was my sixteenth hour of consciousness and almost my fifteenth hour of work.

During one of my lapses in concentration brought on by my desire for sleep, I found myself staring out the window and I noticed that two starlings (I think) were eating another bird, a sparrow. It was kind of sad; even more so because it didn't look like the sparrow had left this world in a valiant battle, outnumbered and utterly defeated, but instead the sparrow looked rather flat and not unlike a sparrow might look after an incident on highway 417 (a fairly short distance from my work, as the starling flies).

I regained my concentration and worked a bit longer before I couldn't sit down anymore. I ended up pretending I was a ninja (as I said, kind of out of it); I was drop-kicking chairs and everything. I imagined that a group of terrorists was taking over the building, and I figured out my escape: I would shoot out the window (with a gun I no doubt procured killing one of their men) and jump to the roof of the adjacent building, about two storeys down. Nevermind that it's a solid 15 meter jump, and that I'd have to do it off of a printer stand -- it would look great in a movie.

At or around this time, I remembered that my pager battery had been dead since last night, which causes my pager to decide it had best not vibrate when a page arrives. It turned out my parents had been paging me, wondering when I was coming home. I moved to a quiet room (a quiet room being a tiny window office with a phone for personal calls -- you know someone's looking for a new job when they take a lot of calls in the quiet rooms), as I was too lazy to turn my music off (not to mention the fact that I don't have a phone at work). I lay down on the desk beside the window and called my parents. Looking up at the sky was utterly terrifying, as it felt like it was engulfing me. The sky was dark and the clouds were pulsating and I kept thinking of the Arthur C. Clarke story ("Nine billion names for God," or something along those lines) which ends with all the stars going out without a fuss when all the permutations of God's name are recorded and man's purpose is accomplished.

So finally, at around 10:30PM, I compiled what I hope is a more or less bug-free version of the program I needed to finish prior to leaving work. I will undoubtedly find more bugs tomorrow, bugs that I'll have to fix at home, since the computers at work are useless. But at least I've given them a working version. In theory.

I was packing up my desk, and I felt not unlike a member of the Ghostbusters with my keyboard sticking out of my backpack, which was filled with network cables, trackballs, and the like. Unfortunately, I think the Ghostbusters had better quality backpacks, as mine fell open when I took it off at the car, spilling CDs and computer equipment across the sidewalk. Many casualties were made of CD cases during the fall.

I drove home at speeds that likely weren't safe due to the nature of my semi-consciousness, and when I arrived home, the beginning of the Saves the Day song "Jodie" was playing on the stereo. I parked, and promptly fell asleep for a good minute or two, only to be woken up by the line quoted as the subject of this entry. I'm glad I lasted to the driveway.

And now I'm going to slide onto my uncomfortable bed and sleep until the pain in my arms subsides.