I guess any job is like this, but sometimes it seems worse in software development because it's ostensibly a creative, individualist job.  But in fact, software development is a team sport with many players in a variety of roles, all of whom must work together.

You're always rolling that rock uphill, only to find it back at the bottom again on Monday morning. People start to pile on you with questions. A lot of software development is not software development, per se (i.e., hands on keyboard, cranking out code), but answering questions: questions from QA, management, documentation, project management, other developers, and users.  This morning as I was warming up my molasses of what I'd been working on when I left Friday, I got the usual flurry of questions from most of the sources I just listed.

The communication comes through a multiplex of electromagnetic and personal channels.  It's almost funny when I think about it.  In a typical day I'll be chatting with three people simultaneously in AIM while I've got files and folders open on the computer, trying to answer a question.  Around lunch time I usually talk to my wife on either the phone at my desk or my cellphone.  Email comes in so unpredictably (except you rarely get any during the lunch hour) and frequently, you can barely shut it off, which I sometimes do when I'm trying to concentrate on something, without people wondering if maybe you're ignoring them or screwing off.  Then there are my buddies in my immediate cubicle area, rolling and sliding back and forth between cubicles, arcing around cubicle corners like legless primates strapped into office chairs.  Not that we always travel that way -- sometimes you get up and step around the corner, but it's fun and less of a disruption to your train of thought somehow to not get up.

Anyway, Sisyphus.