More on work hours?

Even I'm finding my constant posts about work and the hours to be tedious. I promise that this will be the last one barring major interesting events.

I was at work from 9:30 AM on Thursday to 8:30 PM or so on Friday. By my calculations that 35 hours. Evan, who was there with me the entire time, and I were synching up our two technologies that produce the numbers that run our business. He has it in Excel, and I built it in SAS, so we needed to make sure the numbers come out the same (good news, they do).

Anyway, this was the last push to find errors and discrepancies and it took a good deal longer than we hoped. Still, it was the kind of work that doesn't require a great deal of hard thinking but also isn't so dull it puts you to sleep. In other words, it was the best kind of work to do overnight.

It's been a good long while since I pulled an all-nighter, and I'm sort of surprised I was able to pull it off. Good news if I'm ever a father and need to stay up nights. I did lose about an hour during a fugue state after I went home for lunch on Friday and wasn't able to get any rest because an investor called. I put my head down for about 20 minutes and then got a call from Evan reminding me about a meeting. I rushed to the meeting and kind of woke up there. I don't have clear recollections of what I did during that hour, but afterwards I was pretty well awake for the rest of the day.

Now we just have to make sure this doesn't translate to bragging rights at work. I really don't want to work somewhere that rewards you for staying up all night and day. I'd prefer to work at a place where work is done well and smart and people are expected to have interesting extramural lives. We're getting there.