I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
            – Douglas Adams

I’ve run across this quote quite a number of times, and although it’s not always attributed to the same person, it does seem to most frequently find itself attributed to the late Douglas Adams and I’d very much like to believe that if it wasn’t original to him, then perhaps he was quoting someone else to whom it was original.

One of the stories told about Douglas Adams was that when Geoffrey Perkins first met him, he gave the impression that among other things, he was a man who was about to fall off a chair. The context doesn’t make it entirely clear why he was standing on the chair, but no doubt exists that in short order he did indeed fall off.

Part of the same story is that while he was writing the scripts for the original BBC Radio production of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Mr. Adams would frequently hand the actors their parts just minutes before they were due to go on the air.

I never met the man, but I may have some small idea of what his life was like. I’ve been hearing a lot of whooshing lately.