This has been one incredibly, laboriously, unbelievably long month. Almost every day of it has been filled to the brim with work and responsibilities, which in and of itself isn’t unusual for me — but the round-the-clock nature of those responsibilities has been. For the last two weeks, with both of my managers (and the development staff) in China and the sales team in the central plain states of the U.S., I’ve been serving two very different masters on opposite sides of the earth. Just as one goes to bed, the other comes online. And they all want something from me. The result is that if I happen to be online, ever, even in the middle of the night, I could be contacted about work.

And I have been. I’ve been brought into instant message chats, Skype conversations and phone calls at 10 and 11 o’clock in the evening, after 8 to 10 hours straight of working on sales presentations for huge upcoming accounts, rebranding packages for new customers and adding new or updated products to our websites. It’s been a dawn-to-dusk affair.

This week has been the most grueling. At the ops meeting on Monday, I learned of a very large new sales prospect (which I can’t describe here for exclusivity reasons) that would require some of my attention. Sure enough, I put in a day’s worth of extra hours on Monday and Tuesday alone, designing and compositing imagery for a PowerPoint presentation as well as mocking up customized screenshots of our application. The result is smashingly good, if I do say so myself (an assessment with which my managers also agreed), but I’m beat. This feels like the ninth day of a fifteen-day week, and it’s only Wednesday.

All of this will be worth it, though, and to be honest, it couldn’t have come at a better time. Apple and I are going on vacation next week, spending five leisurely days somewhere that isn’t here. We’re bringing her laptop computer, but only for watching anime and surfing the web. I’m not checking my work email, I’m not forwarding my desk phone to my cell and I’m basically just not going to work for five days. And oh yes, it’s going to be bliss.

The downside is, those five days off are five days I won’t get paid. I work as a contractor and don’t get benefits like vacation or sick days; I can take them if I want, but it’s on my own dime. As such, all these extra hours I’m working this week will serve quite nicely to help offset those vacation days. I was planning to work a full day on Saturday and Sunday, as well as next weekend too, which would make up 4 of those 5 days. But with all these extra hours I’ve already put in, that’s going to get even easier. Hallelujah.

Of course, as this hectic week has (slowly) progressed, I’ve been acutely reminded of just how little patience one can have when one’s life schedule leaves him no margin for error. As a society, Americans have become used to having things happen instantly. High speed Internet, cell phones that deliver your email to you, broadband TV downloads in your pocket…with all of this capability, we’ve scheduled more and more tasks into our days because this technology enables us to complete them. However, all of that extra overhead leaves us really scrambling when one of our high-tech gadgets fails us, or when the realities of life — traffic jams, a sick child, or a family member who needs a favor — come calling. Folks like me operate our lives where even a five minute distraction has an intractable cascade effect on the rest of our daily schedule, one that is already full right to the hilt.

Sometimes there’s wiggle room in the schedule for an hour or so spent doing something unexpected, but in the case of Monday afternoon’s traffic jam, having the time doesn’t necessarily equate to having the patience. My patience, to wit, was sucked completely out of me in one solid hour of the worst traffic, bar none, that I have ever experienced in my entire life. I had just dropped my parents off at the airport; they were on their way home after spending a few days visiting us here in sunny Florida. The traffic on the way was bad enough, but on the way home the apocalypse happened.

I now know that driving will never be a joy in Florida. It wouldn’t matter if they expanded every single road to 10 lanes across (a widening the scale of which already seems to be underway in half the county at once). No; even with an entire state covered over with pavement, there would still be gridlock. And why? Because I am now certain, and willing to stake my life on the fact, that Florida’s drivers are the stupidest, dumbest, most idiotic bunch of talentless gumblejacks in the entire continental United States.

On that fateful Monday afternoon, rush hour had descended upon us as I finally arrived at my freeway exit, just a scant four miles from home. The trip from the airport to here had taken 30 minutes, a fair number at this time of day. Because our tourist season is effectively over, traffic has lessened significantly — but the biggest drop is yet to come, when school lets out for summer vacation. Still, I hadn’t expected season-esque traffic loads. That, however, was exactly what I got when I realized that the offramp was backed up, bumper-to-bumper, all the way to the freeway itself.

I did what I could to avoid coming to a dangerous standstill while still driving in a through-lane of 75 MPH freeway traffic. Escaping death, I ogled at the scene. What the hell was going on? Way off in the distance, at the end of the offramp — a distance that felt like miles — was a traffic light, a light at which I needed to turn left to get home. Oh well, I’ll be patient. Two or three light cycles from now, and I’ll be through it.

Well, two or three cycles came and went, and I had moved maybe half a dozen car lengths. By this point I was glad I had taken Apple’s Mazda, not my GTO, because — besides the damnable, paint-eating love bugs that were already plastered all over the front of the vehicle — I would not have enjoyed sitting through this in a car equipped with a clutch. Eventually, realizing that something was majorly wrong, I left the huge, hulking line of left-turning cars and decided to make a right instead. No problem; I’ll head down to the next major intersection, hang a left, then another, and get home in a roundabout way.

I got to the next major intersection and took up my place in the shorter of the two left turn lanes. Neither line was too long, and soon, the left arrow came on and we started to move. So far so good. Then my line came to a halt. I thought somebody had just gone to sleep up there, but it never started to move again. By the time I checked to make sure no one was going to blow my doors off and jumped into the outermost turn lane instead, the left arrow was red again. Curses.

Then I saw what was going on. The traffic headed eastbound — the same direction I’d initially tried to go after getting off the freeway — was packed solid, bumper-to-bumper, not moving. Like idiots, the people turning left from the southbound side of the intersection were entering the intersection anyway, even though they had nowhere to go. They then stacked up in the middle of the friggin’ intersection, blocking my left turn lane. Dumbasses. Oh well, eventually that traffic will inch up and they’ll clear out of the way.

It didn’t, and they didn’t. Even more incompetent idiots made their left turns into the middle of the pile, and soon both left turn lanes, one westbound lane, two northbound lanes and all three eastbound lanes were completely blocked by these left-turning assholes. Why, why, why would you initiate a turn when you can see that there’s no way for you to complete it? What kind of idiot does things like this?

Apparently, a whole lot of idiots in Florida. Again and again this happened, and the line stacked up so deep that I had serious thoughts about running for my life. By this time the Mazda was in park, I was sitting there with my arms crossed and spending most of my time checking around me 360 degrees in case somebody went crazy and did something dangerous. A huge Silverado HD (one of the left-turning idiots) drove around about eight cars in front of him, vaulted over the median and into the line on the other side — dangerous as hell, but at least it got him out of the way.

After five or six light cycles in which I sat at the head of the left turn line and didn’t move an inch, things finally cleared up enough for me to make my turn. At last. I was on my way home again. Just one more major intersection to go.

As I continued onward toward my fate, the radio traffic report alerted me to a single accident in the entire county. It was right under the overpass where I’d exited the freeway, in the path of eastbound traffic. The domino effect from that single accident had reduced approximately four square miles of traffic to utter gridlock. I absolutely could not believe what I was hearing — and at the same time, I could. You know what I mean.

At the next intersection, another ungodly long left turn line awaited me. I got into it. The line was spilling into the leftmost traffic lane; never exactly a safe place to wait, but I had no choice — there was no better solution anywhere within at least a mile or two out of my way. I was reminded of the danger of long lines like this when I looked up in my mirror and saw a fat, short, old, sunglasses-wearing woman in a humongous Mercury Marquis flying toward me, panic-stopping with her brakes in full lock, trying to avoid rear-ending me. Since I always leave some room in front of me, I moved up as far as possible and she got her big iron boat stopped in time.

I then had to move my car to the leftmost side of my lane, as close to the curb as possible, as this stupid bitch decided she ought to go around me since she wasn’t part of the line of left-turning folks. Had I not moved, she absolutely, positively would have used her Mercury to forcibly remove my entire rear fascia and probably not even noticed it happening. Oh, the look I gave her as she went past would have insta-killed fresh flowers on a sunny spring day. Because of my window tint, however, I think the effect was lost on her.

Finally I made it home. Total time elapsed on the return trip: One hour. Half of which was spent on the last four miles.

As you can imagine, I was in a winning mood for the rest of the evening, as the onslaught of work continued unabated until 12:15 a.m. that night.

That seems like weeks ago, but it was just the day before yesterday. I tell you, next week cannot come quickly enough. There’s just one thing out there that threatens to derail my vacation before it begins — jury service. I’ve been “on call” with the U.S. District Court as a juror since May 1st, for a period of “approximately one month.” Every few days, I have to call in to receive my reporting instructions. So far, they’ve continually told me to sit tight and call again. Sometimes the next day, sometimes in two days, sometimes in five days. Every time it’s different, and every time I get a stay of execution.

My next call-in date is this Thursday, after 6 p.m. Since Monday is a holiday and there will be no court in session, and the end of my month-long “on call” service period most likely comes at the end of next week. I’m hoping I’ll get off without having served at all, but the fates could still give me a real kick in the teeth by telling me to finally report for duty sometime when I’m supposed to be soaking up the sun somewhere nice.

I could just blow ‘em off, and then later say I had some emergency business engagement. Of course, if I do that, I’ll undoubtedly be visited by a corrections officer, fined and jailed for contempt of court. Because that’s the kind of shit that always happens to me every time I borrow a page from the rest of society and try to skip by something unpleasant without taking my lumps. It was always the same deal in high school. I was the utmost follower of rules, surrounded by drunk, stoned idiots who never got touched by the long arm of the law, and wouldn’t care even if they did. The instant I thought “Well, no one will notice” and stepped out of line on something, I got the book thrown at me. You could set your watch by it.

Anyway, I’ve got my fingers crossed that the whole jury duty thing will blow over without a peep. But I’m not cancelling my damn trip on the chance that it might not — that’s one thing I grew out of, at least. In high school I might have dropped everything to avoid even the possibility of running afoul of the rule of law, but not anymore. I put up with enough shit and sometimes I have to just give some back.

That’s gonna be it for me tonight. Drive safely out there.

And for God’s sake…if you can’t complete a turn, don’t start making it.