I have many times sat late at work.
While I was in Bombay, there were so many times to merely avoid the traffic on the way back home. The latest I have done is being in office upto almost 0130 hours, trying to give the final okay to a film created for the annual conference.
Fortunately my previous supervisor couldn’t work late without a drink, so if something had to be urgently discussed it was at a pub or a restaurant. And not without his reiterating that he would have not hired me if he knew I was a teetotaller.
Working at odd hours and odd days, I believe normally don’t yield much. One such meeting was at the restaurant right outside the Bombay airport. The boss was coming back from Delhi on a Saturday after an extremely successful meeting with a key business partner on the previous day. It was time to get into execution immediately, hence the meeting at the airport. (Fortunately we weren’t meeting at the office in downtown Bombay, which would have been more than an hours drive from my home in the suburbs.)
Another such meeting, this time on a non working day in the middle of the week was at the Cricket Club of India in south Bombay. We, rather the boss, decided that the best place to discuss the matter at hand was by the poolside at CCI. With a beer in his hand we ‘analyzed’ women in the pool besides the work at hand. The boss did much of the analyzing, after all I was facing him with my back to the pool. Lunch after the analyses was rather sumptuous at the restaurant at CCI. Don’t remember if we achieved much that day.
These late evenings, normally low on productivity, are some times quite fulfilling. You are ready for the important meeting/presentation the next day or have merely covered a great deal of pending work. On such a day you drive back home with a sense of contentment, and generally feeling nice about yourself inspite of the physical and mental tiredness.
The other side of the story are numerous irritants that plague you in these late evening sessions. Especially if you are not enjoying what you are doing, hunger becomes unbearable, numerous people suddenly start remembering you and you are busy promising to call back. And not to forget home, they will obviously start calling every 10 -15 minutes wanting to know how much longer before you leave for home.
Today promised to be another evening like that, when I decided it would be more productive to write this post. The pleasant drive back home did compensate.