The social media handbook I have been working on for my internship is finally done! This whole project has been personal to me, I placed all my hopes and aspirations for this internship on this one handbook so it had to come out great. I think I have sacrificed enough of my well being to say that I bled over this project.
It all started on Wednesday where I went to work at 11am and then stayed at the office till 6am on Thursday. There was a two to three hour break to attend a fundraiser at a law firm where I managed to joke around with the State controller. Thankfully that all nighter was done with Kristina, an intern, who after pulling the all nighter went to work and even had a phone interview with a congressman. She amazes me with what she is able to do without sleep. I on the other hand drove home and just went to sleep till 1pm. We started with 65% done and managed to get up to 85% in the morning.
After I woke up, I just went straight back to work, coming in at around 1:30 which is really late considering that I am supposed to be at work at 10:30am though I usually come in at 11am. The exec. director knew what I was doing so he did not say anything, plus there really was nothing to do since we just had an event last week. I work on the handbook until 5:30 where there was another event, a sort of mixer for the non-profit boardmembers, internship alumni and current interns. The main attraction was the free food and since I had not eaten anything the whole day I just had to go. After the mixer, I went back to the office where I was joined by Monica, another intern, over gchat. The two of us, or rather, she figured out a workflow using her journalism expertise and we started getting work done quickly. Kristina calls me around 11pm and asks me what she should be doing, at the time she was out with her friends (on no sleep). I tell Kristina that there were a couple of pages that were still not done and that she should call me again when she got home. At around 2:30am I call Kristina, who at this point just got up from a nap and we start working again. Monica during this time had fallen silent and I feared that she had simply passed out from exhaustion as she had done so earlier for about twenty minutes. I frantically call Monica repeatedly but with no result. Carrie, the intern coordinator who was staying up with us emailed me Monica's address just in case I needed to go to her house and wake her up. I passed on that idea and Kristina and I redivided up the work and picked up the dropped ball. I was so pissed at Monica.
At around 3am, I try to sleep on the floor of the office simply out of sheer exhaustion. The office was way too cold so I gave up and after lying on the floor for twenty minutes and got back to work. Kristina had just finished up our biography page and now we were back to placing and editing pages, picking up where Monica had left off. Maybe around 5am or so, Monica wakes up and rejoins the work effort. We start making good time and finish up all the pages at around 10am. Keep in mind our deadline from the printer was 9am, however, Carrie did not say anything about this 9am deadline, so I assume it was not too big of a deal. After all the pages were done, the FINAL edits had to be made and WOW were there a lot. Between Monica and Carrie there seemed to be an endless supply of edits. Only I could do the edits because Carrie did not have Indesign and Monica was using Indesign CS3 which was incompatible with the CS5 file formats that I was saving to for the final versions.
Two hours later, at noon, I thought all the edits were done so I packed up and left the office. I was dozing off on the road and the road from Pasadena was a fairly dangerous one. The 110 highway is LA's equivalent to highway 17 in San Jose, but in some ways worse. To keep myself awake I was hitting myself, blasting music and yelling at traffic. My methods barely worked and a couple of times I caught myself zoning out and getting dangerously close to the sidewall. Enroute home, I get a text from Monica telling me that Carrie had sent over even more edits.
Once I got back to the apartment, I set up my workstation again and finish up all the edits. By the time 12:30pm rolled around, I had finished up the last edits and I promptly fell asleep exhausted. I get woken up by my roommate at around 2:30pm and I check my email and find one last edit! This was the fifth version of Carrie's word document of edits, but the last version was only a sentence so it was alright. After sending in the final draft, Carrie texts back with bad news. Apparently the format we were using of two page spreads would not work and we would have to make each page in the handbook equivalent to one page in the pdf. So I spent the next thirty minutes cutting our two page spreads in half to satisfy the printers. 4pm rolled by when I submitted my truly final draft. I stayed up for an additional hour, making something to eat, I had not eaten all day, and to make sure that there were no more additional edits to be done. After waiting an hour and hearing nothing, I figured everything worked out and breathed a sigh of relief.
I told Monica over gchat I was going to drink a lot to celebrate, but in reality, I ended up sleeping at 6pm and waking up at 8am the following morning. In retrospect that was probably the wiser thing to do anyway albeit it being much more boring.
-muffinman
