Lucas lives a clean life. He doesn't drink coffee, alcohol, or any soda with sugar or caffeine. But he does smoke. At least he used to. He started quitting several weeks ago. The past week and a half has almost driven him back to his bad habit. 
This is Lucas at the end of our mind-numbing marathon of testing. The following are things that have become normal in our sleep-deprived state:
1) Lucas taps his foot up and down with so much intensity that I want to walk over and whack him. I have to physically restrain myself so that I won't:
a) tell him that he is incredibly annoying and I never, ever want to see him again
b) find something really heavy to throw at him
c) pay "Big Bubba" to hold his knee down so it can't oscillate 300 times per second
2) We both joke at least 6 times each day that it would be better to quit our jobs than to endure one more second of testing.
3) The bags under our eyes have caused people to start glancing down when they pass us in the hall or walk past up in the lab.
Seven times we have been threatened with having to redo all of our testing because we found a failure that might force us to get a new build and start from scratch. Four of those times we actually did have to start over. Each test takes 14 hours and has to be repeated 3 times to prove it can consistently pass, so we don't take kindly to threats of that nature.
Thankfully, today we finally finished the entire set of tests. We haven't killed each other. Lucas hasn't reverted to his smokin' ways. To us, the week has been a success. But he wishes he hadn't chosen last week to stop smoking.
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