I'm tired, but cannot sleep...

So it's 5:13am on Friday. I got into bed at 9pm last night, read for hour, turned out the light and have managed to not get more than a two or three hours of sleep. My mind just won't stop going...

Yesterday started very early [for me]. I got up at 6am so I could be into work and carpool to the Annual General Meeting with Brian and John. Aside from the watery orange juice and coffee, things went well. The Davison Country Club weathered a very brief but intense blizzard or two. It was interesting to hear about the company as a whole, too. I'm usually bored with such minutia as was explained yesterday, but given the light of the economy these days and my love of work, it was fairly interesting as a whole.

After that, it seemed like a typical bear of a day. For this time of the year. [I'm talking hybernation, of course.] The work on my desk was limited to new MDOT TEA [Michigan Department of Transportation - Transportation Enhancement Application] grant and a SHPO [State Historic Preservation Office] application. I was basically wrapping up what I could do on them at around 3:30, but, as luck would have it, that's when things started getting interesting. Doug came up and told me that a client wanted a new layout for a cycling/pedestrian trail project we're doing in Flint. It's gotta be done ASAP and it's going to a lot of rather important people so it's gotta look good. Not a problem. It needs to go out by the end of the day on Friday, but with 2.5 - 3 hours left to work yesterday, I figured I could get a good portion [if not all] of the work done right then...

Boy was I wrong.

When last I saw the CAD file--mercilessly hacked, cut/copy/pasted, drawn across, frozen, unfrozen, blocked, exploded and edited--everything was the way it should have been. I even made a couple PDFs to send in with the TEA grant for the project last week. Between then and now, the file was a completely different beast. At first, I didn't realize it. I went straight to a new layout page and started setting up a plot. But then Doug swung by my desk to tell me something and pointed out that something was awry. The new creek was somehow flowing through a bunch of MCC buildings. Easy to fix. Until I started noticing all the other things that were wrong and--as they started to pile up--not so easy to fix. I'm not sure if it was out recent switch to the latest version of AutoCAD which is not backwards compatible with the previous version, the involvement of some additional surverying work and plotting that was done by someone else, my funky and not entirely competent AutoCAD skills [especially since the last upgrade--folks, if you thought the previous versions of AutoCAD were laborious, confusing and unintuitive, you have NOT used AutoCAD 2007] or [most likely] a combination of all of the above, but whatever the case after two hours it was obvious that some things were completely gone, some just moved, some perfectly fine, and some looked as if they'd been replaced with older, obsolete versions I'd worked on weeks and weeks ago. It's a mess and I'm a bit worried about getting it sorted out in time to get some of quality produced.

It's safe to say that by 5pm I was a tad panicked and stressed. And the ladies across from me in Marketing had it even worse. They were putting together a qualifications package for a new project. The folks who wanted it, wanted it to be sent out that evening via email, so the girls were rushing to make sure that happened. Like me, however, they ran into some issues with files and things not working out the way they had planned. They didn't have my extra day though. In the end, they had a PDF put together to send out that was simply too big. But it still needed to go out immediately and unfortunately the pressure got a little too high, people got upset and the decision was made to call it an evening, take a break and tackle it first thing in the morning.

Well, having had the experiences I've had in graduate school, the 'survival instinct' started to kick in at that point. Once things had settled and most people had calmed down and gone home, I switched desks and started to pile through PDFs, documents and our friend Acrobat Distiller 8. I'd mentioned this process earlier in the day, but they explained to me that they'd run into issues with the CorelDraw created PDFs and were short on time. That led to our other way of creating PDFs which, unfortunately, isn't light on the memory and tricky with quality control leading to the decision to remove the images and graphics all together. [This was the point where there were all sorts of people there at the end of the day, all trying to make sure it went smoothly and the pressure got out of hand.] I wasn't doing anything that the previous person didn't know how to do, nor was I doing it in a revolutionary way [rather the opposite, actually, because I was still there until 7pm and it still wasn't 100% perfect]. I was merely doing it without the pressure or constraints they'd had--which changes everything.

I think my efforts got the job done, impressed people and, hopefully, eleminated the most of the stress that went with it. Since then, my minds been going non-stop. Everything from Vancouver to Flint to work to life to love to this awesome idea for a Che Guevara/office culture knock-off poster with his unforgettable image and the phrase "Cube Libre!" across the top. It'd do remarkably well, I think.





So I find myself sitting here in the dark, thinking of all the times I've tried to help in similar situations throughout my life--particularly in graduate school and most particularly very recently--and how, if history had any bearing or inclination towards repeating as it has in all the other situations, instead of coming up with a successful solution, I should have found some way to nuke the computer I was on, invalidate all the software liscences, crash the server and erradicate the company's S:\ drive.

I'm thinking of why I react to some things with what seems like limitless optimism, grace and talent, while my reaction to others is just the opposite. Pessimistic, hurtful and problematic.

Thinking of why I react to some things and not others.