How many hours can a human being work?

I really have no right to complain, but I will anyway.

My colleague regularly responds to email, reviews pricing proposals and preps for executive reviews at one o'clock in the morning. The industry is insane. He rides home in his carpool, spends time with his family and goes back to work when his son's in bed.

I worked three weekends last month, including the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. Which makes sense, in some perverted way. For two weeks, I worked from five a.m. until eight p.m. I ate dinner at the desk in my home office. Only once during those hours did I turn to look out the window behind my desk. I'm turning into a troll.
I used to play with trolls when I was a child, but I never thought I'd be one. Of course, that's a cute troll, a Barbie-like troll, a Kewpie doll-like troll.




Not the real thing, which is closer to what I feel like this summer as I miss the sunrise and the sunset because I'm staring at the bright screen of my iMac.





And because I love words, I had to know what a troll really is. Who knew ... it's someone who deliberately posts "false or controversial messages to gain attention for the sake of attention" (hmmm), or it's an Upper Peninsula term for people who live in the Lower Peninsula, below the Mackinac Bridge and it's dragging a baited line behind a slow moving boat, and a race of giants in mythology or a Scandinavian term for elf. I thought trolls lived under a bridges.

But I digress ... I look like the creepy guy above because my shoulders are hunched over a keyboard and everyone who sends me more email requests will get a virtual club over their heads. So I'm taking four days off. And I've only peeked at my email three times, I haven't responded to it at all.

That's the dysfunctional life of Silicon Valley. Checking email on vacation, working at night. I read about a woman who confessed she hid in the bathroom so her kids didn't see her checking email on her Blackberry. Is it dysfunctional? We think it is. I think it is. I'm exhausted. Everyone I work with has dark circles under their eyes and a rant of their own about the latest irrational request from management. But wait, what about farmers? Waking up before dawn and racing to beat the seasons? What about life before Blackberries and washing machines, refrigerators and cars, computers and cell phones, grocery stores and dry cleaners and on-line shopping and indoor plumbing? What about the 982,000,000 people who live on a dollar a day or less. I imagine they're more exhausted than I am.

Still, I need a day off. I need a nap. I'm tired of marketing slides and email and meetings and data analysis. I'm tired of being a troll. So I took an extended weekend - two extra days off, in September, when everyone else is back from vacation. And what am I doing? Sitting in front of my iMac like a troll, hopefully with a head of pink hair rather than a club in my fist.

--Cathryn Grant