Sometimes you don’t get the extra work you want when you want it. You get a little with lots of time to do it and the you get all of the rest with less time to do it.

I had 10 days to finish marking my first five batches of exams. Starting tomorrow I’ll have four days to finish six batches. (Note: for complicated reasons, that’s about the same number of exams.) Because of that I found myself wishing that the junior high first and second year exams had been a couple days earlier. I would have even been happy to come in on Saturday.

Instead the exams are late in the exam period and the first set of pass backs is on the earliest possible day for pass backs.

This wouldn’t be so terrible except that we’ve also got pass back classes eating up time that could be spent marking.

At the same time, there’s been a sudden interest in ink and because I’m in the “yeah, sure, I can totally do that” phase of the business, I’m spending a lot of time fielding emails and texts and taking pictures of ink samples whilst working my phone charger overtime. (Note: I’ve discovered that I’m a surprisingly good up-seller/enabler thanks to the Detective Colombo “Oh, just one more thing” style of sales.) I’ll be dealing with all that on Monday and Tuesday. That leaves me only a couple free days to buckle down and do the marking that is my actual job.

As work tend to expand and contract to fill the time, I’ll get it all done, and hopefully won’t have to pull an old-school all-nighter. Then again, knowing me, I’ll probably do that anyway, I just won’t get much work done. Then I’ll have to do it all suddenly.