Once, while working on a huge C++ project, I sat down at a terminal after dinner and put some bubble yum bubble gum in my mouth. It was grape flavored. I began chewing, and also began writing code.

At about 10 am the next morning I regained consciousness. It seems I had entered the zone. I don't really remember how the 14 hours I spent in the zone passed, but somehow I had a few thousand lines of code written and debugged, almost all the functionality of my project was implemented, and now the sun was up. My fingertips were a little numb, I felt like I had blanked out, and at about this point in time I remembered I had been chewing gum.

I wondered what happened to my gum, and then realized there was this mush in my mouth. The gum had lost all its properties of cohesion, having instead the same texture as a shredded wad of wet toilet paper. I tried to spit the nasty goo out, but that didn't work. I even tried to scrape the junk out of my mouth, and tried to rinse it out with water. It was a nightmare!