When I was at art college one of my classmates, Stuart, did a film project where he got two of us to eat a whole chocolate cake each. He set up two cameras, one on each of us filming continuously as we ate the cake. These cakes were family sized cakes, extremely rich, chocolatey cakes with multiple kinds of chocolate all over the outside.
We started to eat the cakes, they were really delicious cakes, sweet and tasty. We both devoured the first quarter of the cake, no problem, this was an amazing thing to eat, super tasty.
The second quarter of the cake tasted great too, it was still nice to eat, by the end of this piece I was starting to feel quite full of cake.
On to the third quarter it started to feel slower going, chewing the cake was taking longer, the taste was a little too sweet now, my taste buds were no longer excited by the sugary taste. There was now a bit of reluctance when it came to putting mouthfuls of cake into my mouth, I would most definitely have been more than happy to stop eating cake at this point.
The fourth quarter, starting this piece I was definitely forcing myself to eat it, every spoon felt like putting something horrible into my mouth, the rich, sweet, sugar now making me feel sick the more I ate of it. My body reacting with every bite, as I chewed what was once tasty chocolate that now was like the grossest thing I could be putting in my body. Swallowing was slow, fighting the rising urge in my body to throw up. This fourth quarter took a long time to eat, there was no joy in the eating now, compelled to eat it as the aim was to finish the whole cake and get it done.
This experience describes how work projects seem to go sometimes, I enjoy the work I do, but every so often there’s a “fourth quarter” and it becomes extremely hard going, trying to get through those final mouthfuls of cake.