I remember in Uni finding out that my final year project was due in 3 days. I wasn't exactly with it then. So I took 2 days programming away with pretty much no sleep, and lots of ProPlus. On the last day I was pretty happy until I realised I had no paperwork whatsoever. How much is needed I ask in my dazed kind of way. At least 50 pages is mandatory, 100 pages expected. Binded. Twice. Ah. Think I typed fairly constantly for 3 days, and I slept about 5 hours in those 3 days (all on keyboard). Totally killed me. Would probably really kill me now
Also when working in Dubai we had this huge project (think in total there was about 300 people working on it for about 4 or 5 years). Our bit was working ok on go live so we went for a drink. Half way though alarm bells sounded so we came into the office. At 2am. After firefighting a load of issues for about 24 hours we then had to sit there the following night watching this damn queue process travel bookings from around the world (hate it when other countries *exist*) to make sure nothing went wrong again. We had a set of cards, but the regional manager of Emirates Travel (company owned by Emirates Airways) who we were sub-contracted to was there to keep an eye on things. When you haven't been to bed for a few days there is nothing so boring as a slowly scrolling screen of travel information. And the small office was practically foggy with smoke (have you ever seen AC struggle with too much smoke?) Ach...
The next day we decided to make sure all was ok before going home at 9am. At this point I was feeling pretty good strangely, but almost not there if you see what I mean. Unfortuantly at 8.55am the regional manager came in again and wanted a meeting. I was more junior so just programmed away in the background. They asked if I could stop typing as they couldn't concentrate. I did, but unfortuantly travel booking systems are not the most interesting topics, especially if you haven't slept in days and actually didn't know the area they are talking about (our main system has 6000 programs; I've now worked there for 12 years and estimate I have modded about 2000 of them. Probably another 2000 with the Y2K upgrade but thats monkey work). About an hour later they woke me up from my keyboard. Apparently they let me sleep because I looked so peaceful and only woke me up when I started snoring (too loudly). They took me for a walk, but 50 degrees C combined with massive sleep depravation really freaks you out. I saw weird colours and everything. Totally trippy. Last thing I remember is giggling like hell at some stupid name on a garbage truck. They nicely gave me about 4 hours before hauling me in to fix a bug
Cheers
I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
Current fave quote : "She was like a candle in the wind.... unreliable...."
