The Closer You Get, The Longer It Takes

What is it about the last day before vacation that makes it seem simultaneously a million hours long and way too short?

I had three projects that I wanted to wrap up before I could leave with a clear conscience -- two were my own projects and one was a project I'm helping a colleague with. And, I had an hour-long meeting to suffer through.

I finished up my part of my colleague's project first. I had to record an audio snippet, finish editing a bunch of audio files, and send them over to my colleague. That one was easy.

The next project was trickier, in that I had to merge new audio (different audio) into the presentation, make sure all of the links worked as advertised, publish the course, post it, and test it.

And it didn't work properly. I did this and tried that, republished a zillion times, uploaded more, tested more, and damn. I found myself getting edgy and annoyed, because I really wanted to get this done. So I left it and switched to the last project, which was also an audio editing deal. I got all of he audio imported and set about syncing the audio to the PowerPoint animations and...

Goddammit!

It wasn't working as it should have. I could not for the life of me get the sync to work. As the clock wound relentlessly down toward quittin' time, I decided to cut my losses and remove the animations. They weren't critical, just fancy -- no great loss. So okay -- publish, test, GAH! The evaluation wouldn't load. All right, delete that one and insert another one, republish, test, whew! Post.

Back to the other project. I had a idea of why it wasn't working, so I tried a little test.

Eureka!!

The test worked, but would the real thing work? I posted the course for real, crossing my fingers as I did because once I posted it, I wouldn't be able to back out of it without a lot of messing around.

It worked.

I was done, with a half-hour to spare.

And that half-hour lasted a day and a half.

But now -- now I am in full vacation mode. Merry Christmas!