It's 5pm on a Tuesday. You've already had your last meeting, last coffee, and last shred of patience. Sarah from supply chain pings you on Slack:

Quick one — can you forecast our parts demand for the next six months? Just something rough. Need it for Friday.

Quick one. Friday.

You know the drill. Pull purchase orders out of Postgres. Clean them into a weekly time series. Engineer some lag features. Train an XGBoost baseline. Validate it without lying to yourself. Build a dashboard somewhere Sarah can actually open. Write the email explaining what's solid and what isn't.

It's a week, minimum, even if nothing breaks. And it's also, somehow, a "quick one."

This is the tax on every analyst — the long tail of hey-can-you requests that pile up faster than you can clear them.…