The Fear

I'm not sure why, but my Sunday's are generally ruined by thinking about Monday. I'm pretty sure it goes back to school days when I would dread going to bed Sunday nights because I knew when I woke up I had to go to Alcatraz. But now I am 38 and I still get it.

Classic example was this weekend. On Friday afternoon, just as I was thinking about the approaching weekend, I got two bugs assigned to me for this website I maintain. I had a quick look at them and they looked like right tricky little fuckers. I created this template that was a fixed width pop up, and data would be fed into it to dynamically change the size an image. It seems that something I had done had been coded incorrectly and the images were wrapping onto the next line, in Internet Explorer 6 only. I had one foot out of the door, so stuck the bugs in my 'something to sort out for Monday' memory bank.

I had a good Friday night, Saturday was pretty cool to and late afternoon drinks eventually turned into early Sunday morning ABFs. I awoke quite early yesterday morning with a remarkably clear head and proceeded to do family things. At about 3pm I settled onto the couch and started to go through all the sport I had Sky+'ed over the day. It was then that the bugs I had left behind started to bother me, and I wondered how I was going to fix them. This went on until the evening, and the later the hour got, the more I began to dread Monday. I had a really restless night's sleep, and kept waking up every half hour or so looking at the clock. The ratio of sleep to clock viewings swung in favour of my digital friend over the course of the night until it was finally time to get up. I had a worrying journey into work and once in, put off looking at the bugs, dreading the mayhem they would cause my day.

After two cups of coffee, I gathered up enough courage to tackle them. It took me about 7 minutes to fix and they were assigned back to QA before she even got into the office. So basically a quarter of my weekend was spent worrying about something that took me less than 10 minutes to solve. Why do I do it to myself?

I've also noticed that my hanovers are getting worse. Not the physical side, that's to be expected as I age. It's the mental side that is troubling. If I have a hangover now, I get The Fear where all sorts of things worry me. Little things normally, but financial matters are most common. It's like a recurring dream although I know it's coming. But as much as I tell myself that it's just a sympton of the alcohol, I still feel irritable, worried and anxious. There is a great Afrikaans name for it, bang babelaas, which directly translates to scared hangover.