December at the haus means client deadlines stacked on holiday deadlines, a packaging station buried in ribbon and shipping boxes, and four dogs who found their own way to keep morale up. Here's what deadline week looked like from somewhere around ankle height.
December means deadlines, and deadlines mean dogs underfoot
By the second week of December, the schedule turns into a different animal. Client deadlines stack on top of holiday deadlines, the packaging station becomes command central for gift boxes and final deliverables, and somewhere in the middle of it, four dogs decide the leftover cardboard is the best real estate they’ve seen all year. Nobody built this into the production calendar. It just happens, every December, right on schedule.
Hudson and Houston have lived through enough of these crunches to know the drill by now. Sapphy and Hachi came down for a few days too, visiting from David’s sisters’ place, and adjusted to the pace faster than most new hires do. Four dogs, one packaging station, and a stack of empty boxes nobody had the heart to break down before someone turned them into a fort instead.
Hudson works the room, Houston works the boxes
Hudson treats deadline week the way he treats everything: as an opportunity to check on every person in the building, one desk at a time. He has a radar for who’s stressed and who isn’t, and he plants himself under the desk of whoever looks like they need it most, tail thumping the floor on a loop until somebody finally laughs. This December that person changed by the hour. He never once seemed to mind the rotation.
Houston had less noble motives. He found the fort first, three flattened shipping boxes leaned into a lean-to near the packaging station, and claimed it before anyone had finished taping the second wall. He spent most of deadline week ducking in and out of it with something he wasn’t supposed to have, a ribbon spool once, a swatch of wrapping paper another time, gone before anyone noticed it was missing. He never got caught in the act, not once. Somehow that fort held up better than most of our task lists did.
“Houston built himself a corner office out of cardboard and ribbon scraps and defended it like it had his name on the lease. I walked past it forty times that week and he never let me see what he’d stashed in there.”
Devon Reyes, Motion & Photography Lead
The late nights nobody scheduled
Final deliverables always run past dinner in December, and this year was no exception. Somewhere around ten on the worst night of the week, half the team was still at their desks, and all four dogs had quietly relocated underneath them. Hachi curled up against a chair leg near the print station like she’d claimed the spot years ago instead of days ago. Sapphy took the corner under the conference table and didn’t move until the last file exported.
Treats came out heavier than usual that week too, the kind of extra handful someone hands down without thinking too hard about it, because thirty seconds of petting a dog is cheaper than a coffee break and does more for the nervous system. Nobody scheduled that either. It’s just what happens when the pack is the one part of the building that isn’t stressed about the deadline, and everyone else needs to borrow a little of that calm to get through the last export.
“There’s a version of this job where deadline week is just pressure, full stop. And then there’s a golden retriever asleep on your feet at eleven at night, and the pressure gets a little more bearable. I don’t know how to build that into a production schedule, but I wouldn’t want to run this place without it.”
David Keyes, Founder & CEO
Organized chaos, holiday edition
The boxes came down eventually. The deliverables went out on time, every one of them, the way they always do here even when the week looks like it shouldn’t be possible. What stuck around longer than either was the reminder that the pack isn’t a distraction from the work. It’s part of how the work gets done without breaking the people doing it.
We talk a lot about organized chaos as a way of operating, swagger and heart running through the same room, hard work and real play sitting side by side. Most weeks that’s a mindset. Deadline week in December, it’s four dogs curled under four different desks past midnight, keeping the whole place standing until the last file sends. We’ll take that trade every single year.
