I am SO tired these days ... not that it's much of a surprise that getting up at 4:30am in order to get into the office by 7:45am is wearing. I almost screwed that up last night / this morning ... first, I fell asleep at my desk - which wasn't so much of a problem if I was getting up around 8am, however, it meant that I only had one hour of horizontal sleep. Then something happened to the morning ... I'm not sure what. The only thing I can figure is that I spent too much time scraping up breakfast because I just made the 5:35am bus ... and that took a mad dash to get to the corner before the bus took off. Because of the tight connection times between the #36 CTA bus, the Pink Line train, and the #322 Pace bus, if I miss the 5:35, I'm probably going to be in transit for three hours instead of two and a half. As it is, I'm always just making the Pink Line ... except for when I don't. And if I don't make that train, it means that I'll have a wait at the end of the line for the next suburban bus. The good part is that usually if I get on the 5:35am #36, I'll make it up to the platform at the Library stop right about when the Pink Line train is making the turn onto the bottom part of The Loop ... and when it gets in at 54/Cermak the #322 will be waiting ... so there's not a lot of standing around in sub-zero wind chill (projecting forward a bit with that), except, of course, when I get out to Lombard (which I'm beginning to think of as my own personal Trenzalore), and have to do a 20-minute walk across endless mall parking lots.
While we sort of have a plan for my getting a car to cut that commute down from 2-3 hours to probably under 1 hour, I'm still sort of hoping that they'll eventually opt for me working from home most of the time. 90% of what I've been doing - in terms of communicating with others there - has been via e-mail or IM or phone, which would work just as well if I were sitting here as it does with my sitting there. My immediate boss is very remote-positive, but his boss doesn't seem to like the idea at all. Some of the sales guys have been trying to convince me to move out there ... I don't think they appreciate what a "nightmare scenario" that would be for me! I have never understood how anybody can stand to live in suburbia.
Oh, by the way ... this is what my 2.5 hour commute looks like (there are likely some inaccuracies in the #322 route - it stops at 3 malls, and I'm only guessing the route once it leaves Cermak, goes through the Oakbrook mall and then heads over to Yorktown) ... click for a bigger image:
