The Outer Mind's turn to rant

After working on my project continuously for over fifty hours straight without any sleep thrown in, sleeping the next eighteen hours without even grabbing food, flunking a programming test in C++ as I had not spent any time preparing for it and attending a send-off bash of a senior scientist at my research centre (he got a job in the private sector with an obscenely high salary!) , here I am, back at my desk, updating my blog. The evening is young and the night promises to be another long one, one that blends into tomorrow, not just because the date on my Timex will say so, but because it will be time to freshen up and grab breakfast in the canteen. Its a blink-and-you-have-missed-it affair as getting breakfast at the canteen is all about being!
A tad too late, and you will only succeed in getting either a sarcastic smile or a whole truckload of rants about people not turning up on time, depending on the mood of the lady in charge, and if you are really, really lucky, you might even get a couple of bread slices! Sounds straight out of Oliver Twist or what?! Sorry to disappoint you, but that is what happens to most unfortunate souls who turn up late for breakfast at our centre's canteen. After that will be the lectures that commence at 10 AM sharp, but its not uncommon to find harried and clearly sleep deprived individuals coming in even twenty minutes later. Its also not at all uncommon to find many of them dozing off on their books! The road ahead seems to be pretty rough. My team's first project is still in the wilderness and a second one has been already been thrust onto us... The mandatory sleep gives us pangs of guilt, not to mention 'Fail' grades in the ever ongoing evaluation processes! The periods of occasional sleep are generally dreamless. Its like a light going out. More like a fuse being tripped off. You are dead to the world and its pressures. Wish that state could last for ever, but no... The social cues get in the way. The alarm goes off, the skies grow brighter or your guilt just overcomes even the dreamless state of death-sleep....
The biggest challenge at the moment facing all my colleagues and I, is to be able to minimize sleep, maximize work and still managing to hold on to our sanity. God save us all!