Sometimes I have to wonder if I've ever really grown up.
I always had imagined High School as being this very unique period in my life. I have many stories of that magical and mystic time that I could tell, but today I'll just focus on one.
Today's story, children, is the Story of Scheduling.
Ah, freshman year. The time of complete innocence. A time when one followed all the rules because the hint of administrative repercussions were enough to strike fear through our pristine hearts and souls. A time when you feared being tardy too frequently, or absent too many times.
Well, that didn't last long.
For my first two years in High School, I had Concert Band for my first period. There were a few great many benefits of this arrangement (band, arrangement. Hah! I kill me.) Anyway, two of the great benefits of having band first period were:
- You could get there late, and they didn't really mind too much, as long as you weren't overly late and non-disruptive when you got your instrument and to your seat (and we avoided the eye of the real administration by having our own private entrance into the school)
- Through the magical combination of orchestration and instruction, you often had some spare time while sitting in your seat to, oh, I don't know, do the homework for another class that was due that day.
It was great. Punctuality didn't matter, and you had the opportunity to do homework for other classes during that class. Perfect harmony in the universe was achieved. And then came junior year.
For the first time in my High School career, the rules were about to change. I was no longer going to have the "perfect" class first period. Instead, I was going to have AP Computer Science. Well, this turned out to be even more ideal. Since I was acing the class, my teacher didn't really care if I arrived late (provided I could still sneak by the administrators who did care), and since I got my work done very quickly in that class, I had plenty of time to work on other homework due that day.
Of course, many bad habits started to form during this whole time period as well.
Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?
I started getting very good at estimation by determiming how much time my remaining homework would take me to complete, and then waking up that much earlier (something that is very hard for me to do, by the way) in the morning to try and do it. Well, as the years in High School progressed, the workload became heavy enough that, while possibly due to poor planning on my part, following the same algorithm sometimes meant that I couldn't go to bed anyway, because I needed all that time to do the assigned work. Well, not sleeping was never an option I was comfortable with accepting. Always one to weigh my options heavily, I took the only other natural response: I skipped classes and got to school late until the work was done.
It made perfect sense at the time. Especially during senior year when I had AP Calc first period. Damn that sucked. If half your body was outside the door when the bell rang, the rest of it wouldn't be allowed in until you got yourself a late slip. And other homework during AP Calc. Keep dreaming. Now mind you, this was usually just for my writing assignments. For some reason, my genius on paper could only be unleashed when there was complete and utter tension caused by the stress of an absolute immediate due date.
So, why the hell am I talking about all this stuff now?
Annual reviews
In the modern day corporate society, we have to re-validate our existence every year, by documenting everything that we've done, and reminding upper management why we're so great. Well, just like High School, I was in need of that impending doom stress before I could get my review done. Hell, I needed that pressure before I could even let myself get started.
So, it was due yesterday. Wednesday night, around 10pm I finally got started. After sifting through all of my weekly status reports and summarizing them all into a short file in Textpad, I gave myself a little reward by reading The Bourne Supremacy until I fell asleep.
***.
So, here it is, 10am on Thursday morning, the day that the annual review is due. I had of course started the waking up process at 6am. But, who are we kidding. I used snooze until even snooze just gave up and said, "The hell with it. Just sleep." So, I skipped some classes. I stayed home until it was done around 3pm. At that point, I figured it was pointless to physically go in to work, as I'd have to leave at 5:30 in order to make my fencing class.
With tele-commuting, I feel like my life has started to come full circle. I can once again not worry about being late, and provided that the work is done, no one seems to mind
Note to self: Hmmm....I think I need to work on better endings to my stories. That one was kind of dull.