In the Back of a Late-Night Taxi After Overtime

Two Rollbacks, Three Hotfixes

The deployment ran late. Two rollbacks, three hotfixes. Sent a final "good work everyone" on Slack, closed my laptop, walked out. 2 AM. Empty streets.

Flagged a taxi. Driver asked where to. I gave my address, and the exhaustion hit all at once. Oh. I'm really tired.

Looked out the window. Seoul doesn't go dark, even at this hour.

42 Minutes of Belonging Nowhere

The back seat of a late-night taxi is a strange space.

Not the office, not home -- a no man's land. Slack notifications have stopped. My wife is already asleep. For this little window, I have no role. Not a developer, not a husband, just a tired person sitting in a back seat.

The GPS shows my home address. ETA: 42 minutes. These 42 minutes might be the most honest part of my day. No pretending I'm fine in front of my boss, no pretending I'm not exhausted at home. (Is it weird that I kind of like this time?)

A Story on the Radio

The driver has the radio on. Late-night program.

"My boyfriend works overtime every day. We never have time to see each other."

I smiled bitterly. That listener's boyfriend might be in the taxi right next to mine.

Deployment days mock labor laws and stretch into the early morning. Everyone knows it, everyone accepts it. "Can't be helped," we say. Whether it truly can't be helped, or whether it's just more comfortable to believe that -- I'm not sure.

Through the Taxi Window

Cruising down Gangnam-daero. During the day, this road is packed with people. Now it's empty.

Traffic lights change to green but with no cars around, they're meaningless. Only convenience store lights are on. I can see the clerk inside. They're working through the night too.

The people working at night don't know each other. Taxi drivers, convenience store clerks, overtime commuters, dawn delivery workers. An invisible solidarity. Nobody thinks about it, but sharing the same hours is strangely comforting.

The Driver Looks in the Rearview Mirror

"Getting off work this late?"

Yeah, I said.

"Tech, right? I can always tell. Most people getting in around Gangnam at this hour."

He drives all night. I coded all night. We're consuming each other's overtime while sharing pre-dawn Seoul. I felt some kind of kinship, though that's probably just the exhaustion making me sentimental.

At the Front Door

The meter stops. I tap my corporate card.

Behind the front door, quiet darkness will be waiting. Shoes off, shower, bed -- and a 9:30 AM start waits tomorrow.

The bug I fixed tonight will be forgotten by tomorrow. Reduced to a single line in an incident report. Maybe the saddest part of overtime isn't the exhaustion -- it's that the hours go unremembered.

Getting out of the taxi, I looked up. No stars visible. Seoul, after all. But they're out there somewhere.

Anyway, I'm home.