work consumes me

Not a good day today, kids. I've been at work since about 2:30 p.m., and it's now 10:50 p.m. I told my boss I'd come in on Saturday to check over the answer-key files for the teaching materials we're creating for an online program (a program that ought to have been made months ago). That turned out to be a time-wasting shit show because (1) there are way too many errors in all the files I've looked at (a sign of sloppy work from my lone gringo teammate in the office), and (2) the storage service we're using, iCloud (and its companion publishing software, Pages), is turning out to be a bug-ridden piece of utter shite. I'd been working on one file when the file's name suddenly changed to the name of a different file, and it turned out I'd been typing info into the wrong fucking file for the past goddamn hour. Such are the perils of Cloud storage paired with unstable software. I'm still trying to understand this.

To prove I wasn't hallucinating, I took out my cell phone and shot video of the moment when iCloud deviously changed file names on me. It turned out that the switchover from one filename to another took less than a minute. Son of a bitch. I was furious. So I spent more than an hour just dealing with this problem. In addition, I saw discrepancies between the audio scripts in the answer keys and the content in the main part of the teaching material. These discrepancies needed to be reconciled, and that reconciliation took me way off task. I have, in total, 22 files to go through, and I had thought that I could get through answer-key verification within eight hours. How wrong I was. In the end, I think I got through maybe three of the 22 files, so I have to come into the office tomorrow to continue slogging through this error-filled nightmare. If we had opted not to write up any answer keys, or if we had chosen to publish answer keys after working on the main materials instead of working on everything simultaneously, none of this would have been a problem. I'm hoping that the problem I encountered today won't recur tomorrow, and everything will go more smoothly than today. Like Morgan Freeman's Red in "The Shawshank Redemption," I hope.

I know my boss relies on me to be the vigilant one when we're generating teaching material. He teases me about being "anal" when it comes to proper language, but I've often replied that he'd be up shit creek without me. While it makes me proud to know how important I am to the team, I do kinda need the team not to be so error-prone. Just as an example: one 15-question section of reading-comprehension questions had five errors in it. I had to change those answers. Another reading-comp section (also 15 questions) had seven errors in it. Those are 33.3% and 46.7% error rates, respectively. We need to be under 10%, I think, and I may end up bringing this up during a meeting, even if I piss off my smart-but-sloppy coworker.

I had thought about taking a long nighttime walk out to Hanam City tonight, but now that I know how enormous this task is, I'm going to take a relatively short walk out to Jamshil Bridge and back instead. I'm looking forward to the stress relief. Sweet Jesus. On the bright side, given all the weekend work I'm doing, I'll have racked up another 16 comp hours by Sunday night for a total of 37 comp hours, i.e., about four vacation days. I may have some long weekends ahead of me. Or I might save these days for my upcoming long walk back down to Busan (assuming the walk actually happens).

UPDATE: Tonight, I started stomping down the path toward Jamshil Bridge, but then I realized I hadn't changed into my cycling pants—the ones that prevent inner-thigh friction (among other types of friction associated with the nether regions). Angry at myself, I turned around after barely 25 minutes of walking and went back to my apartment. Attempting over 20,000 steps without those pants is a good way to end up with red, raw, screaming skin, so not having those pants on is a safety issue. I think I racked up only 66 minutes of walking in total (I added an extra loop around a local park during my return). I'll try the long walk tomorrow night or Monday night. This coming Saturday, my buddy JW wants to do a night walk from Bundang back to my place, so we'll be meeting at Jeongja Station and walking nearly four hours (17.5 km) along the Tan Creek path—probably in the rain, according to the current long-range forecast. I won't mind, truth be told.