The hours spent on vast spreadsheets, weekend launches and middle-of-the-night interview requests are incalculable – when our operations director got married, I had to nip out halfway through to do a debate by phone on Radio 5 Live.
Langone Medical Center to work on weekends masks the reality that Langone (and all similar organizations) has a ready supply of interns and residents who are already required to perform that vast majority of "weekend work".
The vast squalor of weekends spent in a field listening to stuff you like, surrounded by people you probably despise, rinsing money you don't have on a pursuit you spend the rest of the year conning yourself into thinking you've grown out of.
At a Middlesbrough football match two weekends ago, vast banners were unfurled, saying "Being Poor is Not Entertainment".
The government banned porn over the weekend, but after vast amounts of criticism quickly undid the block.
Today's tent-pole efforts rely on their opening weekend for the vast majority of their income, and so releases need to be seen as "events" as well as entertainment in order to coax the audience into their local multiplex.
Stereophonics are as much a staple of British summer festivals as hog roasts and burger vans, and often seem as inspiring, but their appearance at the weekend inspired a vast communal singalong and managed to be rousing rather than dreary.
I think the moment I first realised this tech event would be different was when I saw a pile of napkins bearing this legend: What happens when you bring together 1700 hackers, teachers, journalists, artists and other creative technologists for a weekend in a vast, ideas-filled space?
It appeared back in 2004, when the perma-tanned politician hosted the then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair and his wife Cherie for a long weekend at his vast holiday home, Villa Certosa, on Sardinia.
