One difference between birthing a BABY vs. a WEBSITE.
Holy smokes! I don’t think I’ve ever gone this long without posting SOMETHING.
It’s not that I’m tired of blogging. And it’s not that I’m tired of you, kind readers. It’s just that I’ve been fairly consumed by my day job lately. I’m leading a project with a lot of moving parts, one of which is the development of a fairly complex website that is slated to launch this week.
To give you some sense of how it’s going: In more than one meeting lately, I’ve found myself unintentionally substituting the word “birth” for launch. As in – when someone asked if I’m excited about the launch – I said, “Can’t wait to birth it and burp it!”
After using that word for a third or fourth time, I paused to figure out where it was coming from. I’m not a maternal person. I have no personal experience with pregnancy and hopefully never will. I’m not hanging out with a slew of pregnant friends where vocabulary creep could be to blame.
But I realized that although it’s an odd analogy, it’s not a completely inappropriate one. There is more than one parallel to pregnancy stemming from this project:
- I’ve been working on it for about nine months.
- I’ve gained weight from stress eating (although thankfully I haven’t had to give up wine).
- I can’t sleep through the night so I’m generally walking around exhausted.
- I often feel barfy and have sharp pains in my stomach (that’s the Crohn’s, but still…).
- There’s been epic debate over the name.
Also? I suspect this week is going to play out much like a real delivery. There will be a lot of yelling, maybe even swearing. At some point I’ll probably beg someone to “just get it out.” And although none of us will talk about what they see when I push, no one will ever be able to consider me a lady again.
I swear, I’ll get back to more regular (and more comic) posting after I squeeze this thing out.
pithypants 
Hahahaha. One of your best ever!
Sent from my iPhone 4S
Thanks for the promotion, Hoyt!
its very true! launches do feel like what I imagine birth (I mentally hi-fived you for this “I have no personal experience with pregnancy and hopefully never will.”)
A developer (russian) once gave my boss the best quote.
He was asking her how long an app would take to build and she said x months with y devs on it.
So he asked her if we added z more devs could we reduce the time? So she said
“Even 9 mothers cannot give birth to a child in 1 month.”
Yes! Sometimes throwing more resources at something – is just throwing more resources at something. Please tell me there’s a technical term for this that isn’t just “diminishing returns?”
Another similarity: the end result probably doesn’t live up to your expectations…
Or… along those lines: it hindsight, the launch will seem like the easy part! Lord, I hope not!
I like that one of your tags is “bad analogies”
Well, I might be running on fumes but I want to make sure I’m not kidding myself. This was muscled together with a bit of force, not grace.
I’ve missed your humour, Pithy!
Me too, now that I think of it! 😉
Yay, you’re not dead. Though when I first saw your cartoon, I wondered if you’d accidentally conceived. That would explain a long blog absence… what with your speechlessness.
Right. Had it been conception… I think you would’ve simply found a 404 error when you looked for this blog.
NAILED it. Only your boobs aren’t going to explode out of your bra and you won’t squirt your husband with milk in the middle of the night either.
Good point. I also hope diapers won’t be needed. For anyone.
Is it a boy or a girl?
It’s a monster.
Cripes of course it’s a monster.
Speaking of monsters, I’ve been getting all kinds of contractions myself with Windows 8 – if we want to talk about products that never should have been launched I’d put that one at the top of my list.
I’m having a Windows XP issue right now with the site. Glad it’s not just me.