We're finally finishing up a real death march project. Several times over the two week crunch period, I along with several others had to pull all-nighters. It was an unfamiliar experience for me. A different life/career experience, but not something I want to start doing every quarter.
One night I fixed a showstopper bug in some inherited code. More on that later. Anyway I was just on standby if anything broke in my module. At around 1:30 AM I could barely stay awake. So I decided to grab a nap during the lull. In our office there was once a lot more people, so there is an empty upstairs area where there used to be a manager's office that is now vacant. I went up there and layed down on the carpet floor. I rolled up my jacket underneath my head to lay on. It was comfortably warm upstairs.
The sysadmin has a work area just outside the vacant office. There is a server there. The server creates a pleasant droning sound. Listening to the server droning, I was able to fall asleep for a good hour.
I awoke around 2:30 feeling much better. I had a thought when I woke up to sleep another hour and check on the testers downstairs then. But virtue got the best of me and I went downstairs to check how things were going. They were just getting frazzled about some new error. Luckily this time it was a configuration problem in a simulator and not a software error. I pointed out what they needed to change and they fixed the configuration and continued testing. Good thing I went back downstairs when I did.
You'd be surprised when you're that tired how comfortable the carpet floor of a vacant office can be.
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