Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Up late

I got up at 6:10 this morning for a run. I was dreading it: I haven't done hill intervals for years, and I wasn't sure if this was going to be one of those embarassing episodes where you end up in the back of an ambulance, wearing a few small pieces of athletic apparel.

As it turned out, I shouldn't have been so worried: I did 6 fairly painful 45 second dashes up Fort Canning, and all but one were well ahead of my target pace. I jogged home slowly, and still spent the next hour sweating constantly.

The trouble with getting up early is that the day elongates; by 11am it feels like lunchtime, and being in the office til 6 feels like a terrible imposition. I suppose the flipside is that you feel no guilt about leaving at 6:30 to go to the bar across the street, although in more civilised times office workers would stop at lunch for a martini and clear off at 5. I guess it's a matter of your frame of reference.

I also didn't feel any guilt because I wasn't leaving work on time; I was taking an hour's break before getting back to one of those grindingly painful tasks that takes much longer than it should. And no, I don't mean arguing with somebody in another department about forecast accuracy: I've got Outlook and a scripted task to do that sort of thing for me.

I lost a few hours of my life while Excel refreshed a million row spreadsheet (no, I'm not exaggerating, though I wish I was), contemplated proper databases, dreamed of truffle oil-infused mac and cheese, and finally left the office at 10:30. And the horrible thing is that I wasn't the last one out: I scampered back to turn some lights off, only to find some poor Finance type still grappling with invoices. Somebody somewhere needs to work smarter.

0 comments:

Post a Comment