Ah, the stressful day. I love that stomach-tightening, carpal-inducing feeling that you get from being on the edge of a deadline. It’s the closest a non-athlete gets to an adrenaline high, I think.
I spent yesterday throwing together half of a corporate animation for SM (yeah, the shopping-mall moguls). The courier was sitting in the living room waiting for me to hand over my TV-dinner-style obra maestra so he could whisk it away to the clients, those faceless, blue-suited beings who spend their waking hours plugged into the hive mind.
At around 3 in the afternoon, I’m really getting my rhythm, as is often the case when you’ve been working on something for 6 hours straight. I’m churning out work that would take your average office-based designer (a lowly, slave-like being) twice as long to make, and I’m pumped. Unfortunately, when the messenger dude arrives, my concentration is shot all to hell, coz I have to stand up and have him sit somewhere and get him some water, etc.
When I sit back down, I blank out. Like the proverbial goldfish. I stare at the screen for a full minute trying to recall what I was doing. It’s sorta like that disoriented feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and your sheets are drenched in semen. You can see the results of your labors plain as day, but you can’t remember doing any of it.
I love how my PC and I have developed this ridiculous, empathic relationship. (Wait, wait, “love” is not the right word for how I feel about this …) Anyway, when I’m stressed and pressed for time, I begin to make a lot of mistakes and have to go back and redo things. My PC acts the same way mostly. With the messenger dude waiting a few feet away from me, my rig hung twice, once during a burning session so i had to throw the CD away and start over.
Maybe I’m just anthropomorphizing (sp?) my PC here, but it always wigs out when I’m wigged out. And when I’m calm and relaxed, it’s smooth as a Barton. (Ha, a little shameless geek humor for you there.)
Although I love my rig (mostly, except when we’re both stressed), I do look forward to replacing it with something, well, more like a machine and less like a goat. Something, I dunno, more befitting a Major Geek.
Like one of these, maybe lol.
Anyway, I did make it to my deadline, not that that was ever in contention. The messenger guy would probably just have wrenched my hard drive from its chassis, yakuza-style, if I couldn’t deliver on time :/