BANG goes the board against the head

Actually, it made more of a ‘whump’ sound.

First things first: back in the days of the dotcom boom, there was a far-too-prevalent phenomenon that I’ll refer to as the Timesheet Pissing Contest. It usually went something like this:

Worker A: What’s up, man? You look tired.
Worker B: I pulled an all-nighter last night. You know the stuff for the thing with the today-ish deadline? Yeah, came right down to the wire, but, you know, had to get it done.
Worker A: You’re the man! I totally hear you, bro, I clocked 63 hours last week and I am beat.
Worker B: That’s awesome, dude. I’m up to 52 hours this week myself, so with tomorrow and Friday… that’s going to be one hell of a week.
Worker A: Yeah, gotta take care of business, you know?

Notice that there is no mention of what was accomplished in that ludicrous amount of time, nor is there an explanation of why the all-nighter was necessary. That’s the Timesheet Pissing Contest - I work more/harder than you - which misses the point of doing the work in the first place.

I will shamefacedly admit that I worked some of those nights and weeks, and I said some of those things. As time went on, however, I found conversations like this more and more ridiculous. To me, the need to pull an all-nighter indicates some grave failing earlier on in the project. Similarly, an occasional heavy work week is almost unavoidable in my experience, but if every work week is heavy, the company in question needs to hire additional staff, or else it’s tantamount to employee abuse, in my opinion.

Anyway. The upshot is that your capacity to exhaust yourself for the cause isn’t important. Getting things done is.

I think a similar logic applies to surfing injuries. We’re not talking about badges of honor here. They are material evidence that you made a mistake (possibly a very stupid one), and the severity of the injury = the cost of your surfing education. So rest assured that I’m not proud of Wednesday night’s session with SurfYoda, but I’m tired of taking shit for not posting, so here we are.

On SurfYoda’s hunch, we went to Big Lefts (Ala Moana). Head high surf, a little over on the standouts, and pretty clean conditions. I caught a couple of good ones, for me anyway, and ended up getting caught inside for a set. After a long rest outside, I started to paddle for one and realized I was going to miss it, so I sat up and turned around. Helloooooo, cleanup wave. I scratched as hard as I could to get over it, and the nose of my board was about two feet from the lip when it broke. I shoved the board through the lip and kicked my feet, popping my head out the back, which begat the following thought: “Fuck yeah, I made it! Ah… shitIdidn’tmakeitf$%#@*#&@^@%%@&@…” And over the falls I went.

My hands were halfway to my head when the board smacked me in the face. It wasn’t a sharp pain, so I thought I’d gotten away with it, but after ten seconds or so in the washing machine, I surfaced, felt my forehead and drew back just a bit of blood. Any blood in the water is enough for me to call it a day, and I’ll spare you the details of how I got bounced off the reef on the way in.

It’s nothing to be proud of. Here’s your blog post, hope you vultures are happy.