In my compiler course, we had this project and I got an A on that project, but it was difficult. We had one semester to do it, so that's like 3 or 4 months, right? The project was to write a program that translates other programs from one language to another. We did the project in the Java programming language, which by that time I had like 6 or 7 years of experience in. Also the source language we're translating from was a toy language, designed specifically to make the project easier to accomplish. And even then, I often stay at school past 3AM working on the project, and I was stressed like mad.

For my job, we have to do the same thing. Except we have to do 4 projects, so that's like 4 times as much work. Furthmore, the source language isn't a toy language, but a real language used in real life, so that makes it much harder too. And also it's in a language that I've never seen until this after noon. I spent 3 hours trying to learn this new language, writing hello program and tower of hanoi solvers and shit trying to quickly learn it. 3 hours experience with XQuery versus 7 years experience with Java. I gotta make these 4 hard projects in this new language I just learned today. All 4 projects are due either in the 23rd of June or July — I forget which, but it hardly matters because it's an unrealistic time frame anyway. And I gotta do these 4 projects on top of my regular work of programming in Java. Plus I have to learn 1 other language to complete two of the projects, and I haven't even looked at that extra language yet.

I'm pretty stressed out, with stomach pains and dizziness and such. I'm not gonna work overtime, 'cause they don't pay me enough for that. If after this is all done I lose my job, so be it. I made a reasonable effort (though not my best effort - i.e. working 20 hours a day) for an unreasonable demand. We'll see how this all turns out in a month or so.

Unfortunately, my work is having repercussions outside of the office. I was supposed to have dinner with some friends tonight, but I don't know if I can make it.

If the scale is {hate, strongly dislike, dislike, neutral, like, strongly like, love}, you'd better love your job, because once you start doing it for a living, it'll drop down a couple of notches.