The last couple weeks of my life, and indeed the next couple weeks of my life, were occupied by a country I like to call Australia. Australia is this strange little country in the southern hemisphere. You may have heard of it. It's got a pretty big desert.
Anyway, Australia and I have different ideas of what times one should be awake. So when I have to talk to Australia, I have to do it on Australia's time, because it is bigger than me. (If I were to cross it it would probably send forth a legion of wallabies to eat me. Wallabies are a little-known aquatic mammal similar to kangaroos and Batman.)
Australia tends to want to work from 18:30 to 03:00 ADT (Atlantic Doomsday Time), whereas I like to work from 08:00 to 17:00 ADT. So in order to rectify this difference, obviously I work from 13:00 to fuck knows how late. Obviously. This seems to make Australia happy enough to not attack me with fifty thousand koalas (brain-eating drop bears for those who don't know). Needless to say, I'm rather tired of running from hordes of dingoes all night.
The reality of the situation is I'm working on a project with an Australian company that may or may not have all of its wits about it. Every night I send files to this company to test a new interface with a third-party vendor which, among other things, likes files a great deal. It seriously can't get enough of those little guys. Every night those files are bad and wrong and I need to spend the next several minutes correcting them. I have no help and I'm working primarily with code written by someone else that doesn't really manage to do what it's supposed to do.
This is par for the course, of course. Experience and the Internets have taught me the lesson that things rarely ever go the right way. With a lot of effort, this whole ordeal might be over in a week. Then I can start having time to myself again (and not be the only one in the office at midnight waiting for that next file confirmation).
The funny thing, as always, is how nothing I've experienced at work compares in difficulty or time consumption as university work. I don't know if this is the case for all business-world software development or if it's just McCain in general, but this kind of thing is nothing more than time consuming. Real-time is what I would call "life consuming" rather than merely time consuming. It's the type of work that you can never truly stop doing. When dealing with a workload like real-time's, one spends every waking moment working directly or indirectly on it. Sometimes work like that even finds its way into dreams.
Thankfully, I haven't yet had a single dream about the various terrifying fauna of Australia. Or even file-hungry organisations.
(The preceding post was designed to serve as an apology for not having posted in a while. By having read it, you accepted to the following terms: you believe that Dean is awesome, and also very tired.)