The Sleepy Tool

I’m currently working on a writing project that makes me sleepy. It’s not like I’m writing about glue or chemistry or something else really boring. There’s just something about it that makes it really hard for me to keep my eyes open when I’m working on it.

I told Frank about it and he said, “It’s like the sleepy tool.” He’s right. And here’s what he’s referring to: When I worked in advertising I had plenty of not-so-exciting projects to work on and at one point, they were all for a computer client. Any one of them could have been considered boring---a brochure on laptops, a tech guide, a landing page about a warranty—yet  none of them actually made me want to lay my head down on my cubicle desk and drool.

But one project—a tool—did. We worked on lots of tools for this client but it was just this one that put me to sleep. Thus I dubbed it “the sleepy tool.” It was an internal website that sales people could use to create flyers for customers. We were always trying to work out kinks in the system and improve it. And I guess that meant we had to meet about it—a lot. So on a regular basis (weekly? bi-weekly? every day?) a few of us from the ad agency and a few clients got together at their offices to meet about this tool.

These meetings were PAINFUL. And let me reiterate that these discussions were not necessarily about the most boring topic you could think of nor were they particular long. I still don’t know what it was about this particular tool that made me SO tired!  Every time we met, it was as if I hadn’t slept at all the night before. I was holding my head up, trying to look and sound interested but it would take everything I had to avoid nodding off.

If someone would even mention the name of this tool I would feel my eyelids getting heavy. I would start dreaming of my pillow. Caffeine didn’t help. Walking around didn’t help. When new hires came on board and ended up working on the project with me, I would try to warn them.

They, too, started calling it “the sleepy tool.” I wasn’t crazy. This project made everyone feel like narcoleptics. We eventually stopped calling it by it’s actual name and just started referring to it as “the sleepy tool.” Oh, don’t worry. We didn’t say this in front of the clients during the meetings; we were too busy sleeping.