uh-oh. work kills (and other things)

In the recent weeks, Karoshi made the headlines again.

Colleagues, anxious to prevent an unpleasant contribution to that statistic, forwarded me that article with the tagline - "see? don't work too hard".

me? work too hard? .. not really. at least, i've not beaten that victim's 90 hours per month record yet. I came close to it (in terms of the rate of overtime hours per day), but i've not touched work at that volume for quite a while (because i'm too old exhausted to do so). Did that in singapore, perhaps, but not here. yet.

its the "yet." word that inflicts a sense of forebrooding. it is a word full of promise. and dire images of things to come. (!(true==true) == true). dogs and cats cohabiting. sheep beating up lions. taxes coming down by 50%. Harry Potter becoming a computer scientist.

Much of this sense of misgiving is stirred by the recent kickoff meetings for a new project. To be put simply, it was just an ideal idea to be developed based on verbal descriptions. (i.e. we are supposed to listen to what the other side says and try to guess intelligently deduce what they want.

Sounds simple, right? except it isn't. Its envisioned by people who spent their time reading tech books, but have no absolute *swear word deleted* knowledge of how to do it in real life.

"gee. i read in that book that time travel is possible. lets do a time travel machine."

In english: its "shit level" (or number of consecutive "shit shit shit shit shit!" I'd exclaim) "level of difficulty" equivalent would be somewhat like "it must be fast. it must be good. it should have been finished yesterday".

but that would, of course, still be a gross understatement. In fact, "fast, good and yesterday" would be like informatik-heaven. the real accurate description of what needs to be done would be more like "needs to perform at warp speed, reads your mind, understand the klingon language and probably exhibit the intelligence of the genetic offspring of Hawkings and Einstein." All to be done fast (as in "by october").

and I'm supposed to figure out how to do all that based on two one-houred meetings with no written specifications? hm.. you know. i'm starting to wonder if my pay is sufficient for this..

I have just this question for the head honcho indian chief tribal head senior staff there: how long was it before his last slave died of karoshi?