I should have known better than to celebrate being done with something, ’cause now I’ve got a replacement something.

No sooner did I ship off the product of this weekend’s work then I received a phone call from my boss. My day-job boss, I mean. It looks like he and I, plus one of our expert developers, are about to embark on a sweat-equity business building exercise. My boss recently had a brilliant product idea that could potentially change the very industry in which we work, and now he wants to pursue this goal and actually build the product.

Rather than become indebted to some investors, the idea is to build it up on donations of time and effort (initial work done without pay, in other words) and then float it in the marketplace, with the hope that it either becomes wildly lucrative or that another corporate entity buys it from us. As a reward for the upfront effort, we three contributors will each receive equal thirds in ownership of the resultant product/entity. This is exactly the kind of opportunity I’e been dropping hints about with my boss over the last year or so, because it would actually allow me to get some ownership of something exciting. And now it’s here.

The only problem is that I’m somewhat…fearful of the actual product itself. I am not exactly at liberty to explain why — it’s not quite SKYNET, but it’s got the same great taste. That, and I’m a little exhausted right now after spending innumerable weeks working without a day off, and with Christmas coming, I was hoping to actually, you know, take it down a notch? Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen: Because my boss is going overseas in mid-February, he wants to be able to have the product prototyped by then so he can pass it off to our satellite office for assembly. Additionally, Apple and I are going to Thailand at the same time, and I am not going to be able to shove that much work into my day while overseas — not to mention that the technology infrastructure there may not be able to keep up with such demands.

So, our goal is going to be to get the product, the administrative web application and its marketing web presence prototyped in a little less than two months’ time, exclusively in the off hours, for no money. While during the day, I’ll be redesigning our company’s most complex application, completely reworking the website that markets it, and creating a library of around a hundred 400×400 vehicle icons, most of which really should have been done by now.

If anyone would like to send pre-emptive “Get Well Soon” cards, please feel free.

On a side note, I think I need to add a new posting category to my blog here: “Work.”