Multitasking

I've been painfully overwhelmed by my work work this past week, which resulted in several wasted days crying and cursing out our previous developer who left this project in such a goddamn mess. There was also a lot of sleeping during the past week, because that's what I do when I get stressed: I hibernate.

So this is what being an adult is like, because in the past, there'd be a bunch of asses piling on the busywork — some tedious book to read here, a tired paper there, some inevitable mixed media history project with no productive, educational value whatsoever — but then there'd be a deadline and whether you failed or aced the project, you could always just wait it out with the result being passage of time: one, professor: zero. The ephemeral, expiration-date nature of the work made it easy to not give a damn. But, now that I'm grown-up, the work doesn't go away! Whatever I don't finish today mocks me all night long, waiting for tomorrow, with sweet, sweet death being the only release. Like, if I were to get clobbered by a bus tomorrow, I can take solace in my final thought being, "Ha, fuck you, work! You'll remain eternally unfinished, bitch! Ouch, my spleen..."

It's infuriating then the way these hiring companies are looking for people who'll work themselves into a heart attack. The doublespeak term for that is "multitasking," which essentially translates to "doing two projects at once and doing a half-assed job on both of them." It's nothing to do with time-management skills, whatever those are: If Project Orion is going to take four hours to finish and Project Gamma-Z is going to take two hours to finish and they both need to be done in three hours, then Gamma-Z better involve building a time machine.

Frankly, I don't need anyone riding my ass because time is a universal invariant, and for some reason, the most impatient people in the world are also the same ones who have no problem lollygagging when you ask them to do something. Like the IRS will get all up in my face if I file my taxes one minute past April 15, but when Hurricane Katrina hits, it takes the government a week to get anybody down there.