Because of Passover Seder, two of my violin students didn't have their usual Monday night lessons. This meant that I could meet P. over at C. and L.'s house to do a bunch of dancing in preparation for some Tango demonstrations we'll be doing in May for a Leukemia/Lymphoma benefit. I arrived home to Lori's message on my answering machine: did I know what had happened to Foghorn, the Dreamweaver team's checkin chicken? Wow, that takes me back.
When I interviewed with the Dreamweaver team, one thing I liked was the wackiness. Foghorn is one example. Foghorn was a rubber chicken dressed in a blue shirt who lived in an inverted traffic cone that hung on the wall near my cube. When someone was ready to check some code into the master, s/he would check out a certain "token" file from the source control system so that anyone using the system could see that a checkin was in process. That person would then remove Foghorn from the cone and take him back to the cube. If you wanted to know whether the master was locked, you could (back in the day when the team was pretty small) just look up to the wall and see whether Foghorn was in the cone or not.
Foghorn is in at least one Easter egg in Dreamweaver (maybe in the quick tag editor? I can't remember...). One particular Easter egg would bring up the browser with an info window that told all about Foghorn. Funnily enough, that HTML file was actually translated into all of the languages by localization, and I remember H. getting an e-mail from some guy in France who had found the Easter egg, in French, and sent e-mail saying how super-cool the DW team was.
Wacky, wacky, wacky. That was part of the crazy silliness of being on the Dreamweaver team, which almost made up for the part where you were at work a lot. (Actually, my problem was that when I interviewed, my manager had made a point of telling me how reasonable the working hours were, how they didn't want to burn programmers out, etc., which caused me to be completely confused for the first year I was there. If he'd said nothing of the sort, I would have just absorbed the culture, but I spent a long time trying to reconcile his description of the team with what I actually experienced). That wackiness could almost make up for missed dates, crappy diet, not enough exercise, tendonitis...and plus, after working like crazy for a bunch of months to ship the next release, you got almost a month off. When the team switched to a longer dev cycle, everyone started getting really tired.
Thinking back to that schedule and thinking of my schedule now, I'd say I'm far more tired than I was back then, but in a more well-rounded way. Coding for long hours exercised one side of my brain. Teaching exercises all of me, so that I feel exhausted, but also like I've really lived at the end of a day. And thank god I have 2 months in the summer to sleep.
I'm pretty sure Foghorn is dead--when I switched to the Odyssey team his rubber was getting kind of sticky and crunchy, and his feet were going to fall off. But thinking about him reminds me why I stayed at Macromedia for so long when the work was killing my personality: the people there are/were so freakin' cool.