Photo by Camilo, taken Dec 30, 2003

Lord, I'm exhausted. After working late the night I got here, I got up early the next day to work out down the street at Golds. Very cold weather was expected this week, but it hadn't yet arrived, although it was a lot colder than it had been in San Francisco, naturally. By nine, freshly worked out, I was in the office.

I still haven't officially switched into my new business group yet, although all the paperwork is signed. But already my year is mapped out for me. I'll be continuing on this New York project for most of this year. Which I'm pretty happy about. I like the excitement of it, and it will be nice getting to come to New York once or twice a month, especially when it warms up again. It's particularly nice to come here now having friends. I quickly made plans for dinner on consecutive nights with Phoenix and Chris.

There was a big speach at the start of this business year from the program managers on this project from both my company and our customer's, about how this year would be different. We wouldn't have to travel so much, no more crazy hours, better communication. It was all just so much air space. This has been one of the crazier weeks. First, there's a massive deadline to get my second production job fully functional by Thursday. At first I wondered why the rush, but I was soon told that it was to meet an SEC deadline, and that failure to meet it would result in fines against our company. So there was a lot of work to be done. But then they keep piling on more stuff, stuff that really doesn't need to be in place by Thursday. So if the deadline's so mind-bogglingly important, why do they keep making it more and more impossible. On top of all this, I'm flooded with emails, phone calls and requests for teleconferences. Everybody wants to know the latest status. And their managers want explanations about why it's taking so long, so I spend half my time repeating the same stuff up the line. This is all part of the mystery of just how these massive Fortune 500 companies actually make any money, such is their self-destructiveness.

So there were occasional mutterings of the need to pull all nighters. Unfortunately I've built myself into the situation where I'm the only person who has enough knowledge to pull this off. So far, I've managed to avoid working through the night. But last night, I was at it, apart from a break to work out and have dinner, until 11.30. And tonight, I only just finished fifteen minutes ago, at 10.45. The good news is that I've gotten most of the work done that I can without the help from a database expert. The bad news is that I'm at loggerheads with the database expert. We have radically different working styles, and we've managed to piss each other off in a bad way. As far as I'm concerned, we should get together and talk, but he's not big on communication. He announced, via email, that he wasn't willing to talk about it. So now, even though he's in the same office as me, we just communicate the bare necessities by email.

Despite the stress, long hours, and the freezing, biting cold (I'm definitely not used to weather like this), I'm actually enjoying being in New York again. It's nice to come here and feel immediately at home. I know where to get groceries, I have my gym, I even have an occasional personal trainer. It's not San Francisco, but it's a home away from home.