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.

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