Today turned out to be a very long day for me again. Yet another important assignment had to be completed in time, and as you can expect in the business in which I dedicate myself, we all went into overtime mode. Why? Well, tomorrow is the deadline, at twelve noon to be precise, and not a second earlier. That is when our proposal has to be turned in to the reproduction department in order to make the fancy-looking brochure and offer. There is this potential customer who could offer the company all kinds of work, if we could only convince this successful company that we are the best of three candidates for the partner shortlist. So I continued until late in the evening. My job as native English speaker was to review the translated Dutch for general spelling and grammatical errors, but also to collect the input from the various sources and iron out the seventy odd pages to create a uniform and readable masterpiece. My question is why everything always has to be done so quickly and at the very last minute? Perhaps that is inherent to the competitive society in which we live where the hardest workers and most dedicated win the big deals for an insensitive economy. If one thinks about it more logically, it would make better sense to define well ahead of time a long enough preparation period for all candidates, providing a fair and reasonable chance for all. However, we have to prove ourselves, that we are the quickest and the best at the same time, rushing just a little too much in too little time.