"Devil's week" for "tender feet"

As I am getting close to 30 I still have not served my -obligatory- military service. Only to be the next to last of all my friends to still have escaped and probably the last of all that will finally do it. Among those who have suffered it already, as well as for us outsiders, the concept of a "devil's week", a 7-day military ordeal set to distinguish real men from boys is nowadays a distant legend, a story older guys in high-school would constantly recite, enriched every time with some new kind of torture to scare us off.

We are grown-ups now and we know devil's week does not exist unless you are a US Marine corps "afficionado". Nevertheless devil's weeks keep occurring, with some increasing frequency, in our everyday work life. And the last one I had, would certainly qualify as such.

The 100 hours that separated Monday morning from Friday afternoon, included the culmination of more than a year's attempts in terms of my -otherwise boring- work, the final preparation of a manuscript, rewritten as many times as Kazantzakis' "Odysseia" and a public talk in front of my colleagues -which eventually I may have convinced that somewhere inbetween parties and "happy hours", I actually try to do some research. On the margin of all that, I had to attend seminars and a number of meetings with possible future collaborators, in all a number of activities that would probably make my over-active boss feel at home but for a poor post-doctoral fellow like myself proved simply too much.

By Friday afternoon, I felt dizzy, confused and totally unable to focus even on the simplest communicative activity. This had been my devil's week and there was no doubt about it.
By Friday night, I felt all this was past already. As I was dancing in the middle of a room infested with students and post-docs, eager to see the end of this last month of 2007 and the beginning of holidays, I realized the "tender foot" I have become. There was I, having just had a week that to some hard-working people would not even qualify as rough, having beer with my colleagues, not worrying about Monday or the house's mortgage payment at the end of the month, having worked a bit more in one of the best places, in one of the most beautiful cities of Europe and I had the nerve of talking about "devil's week".

I forgot about it all, as alcohol was finding its way through my circulation to meet with fatigue and loss of sleep somewhere at the back of my head. I had a few more beers and went straight to bed.

Then, the next morning while having breakfast, I read Dorris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech only to remember once more the extent of the privileges we relish and how "tender feet" we are becoming.