so you're in your 30's, depressed, and trying to figure out what you did with the last 10-15 years of your life?

(i'm not sure what it means that i'm 28 and going through the same thing...)

the obvious reason:
actually getting to take off fridays off is an iffy proposition, at least in my organization. i objected to it when it was implemented nearly 18 months ago as a sneaky, underhanded way to squeeze extra unpaid overtime out of employees and i feel even more strongly about that now than i did back then. i haven't had an off friday for the past 3 months and it seems increasingly unlikely that i'm going to get to take those fridays off until i get through a march delivery. obviously, your mileage will vary; however, unless your organization is serious about off fridays being sacred (mine, unfortunately, is not --- they expect you to be in the office on those fridays if there's even the slightest business need), expect to lose them quite frequently.

the non-obvious reasons:
1) trying to make up sick leave / personal absence gets to be really challenging. i find the incremental effort from 8 to 9 hours in a day not that bad, but 9 to 10 and beyond is really, really difficult (at least if my goal is to be actually productive as opposed to a warm body).

2) scheduling with clients / customers / team mates that are not on 9/80 gets to be more complicated, especially if you have multiple stakeholders whose off fridays are out of phase.

3) receiving shipments of parts / software / hardware / etc. on time can be difficult unless you have a dedicated receiving department working throughout the week.

4) depending on how you do time cards (assuming you do), correctly transcribing time can be a challenge. (you need two fridays per week)

i'm also in grad school and probably not much older than you are, but i *MUCH* prefer dead tree to electronic for most things (papers i want in pdf but that's about it). i find this particularly true for reference books --- mine end up with a collection of note cards used as bookmarks that are probably worth more to me than the books themselves. of course, i don't have to move my books very far (hooray for ample shelving at the office)

if it were up to me, i would teach a first course in computer science using only pencils (maybe pens for the foolhardy) and paper. i say that as someone who has t.a.'d a lot of programming classes.

the issue, at least as far as i've observed, is that until a student has a solid ability to start decomposing a problem using top-down and bottom-up approaches, trying to teach them any kinds of programming language or algorithms is pointless. it's like having a carburetor and no car.

i would suggest that c.s. instruction, especially at the early phases, should aim to make students spend a lot of time asking questions like: "what information do i need to solve this problem?", "what is the easiest useful thing i can do to help solve this problem?", "what's missing from my solution?", "is it easier to break this step down more or just do it right here?", "how can i join X and Y to do Z?", etc. once you get students asking those questions, picking up programming languages is a lot easier: they know what they want to do, all they need to focus on is how.

it's called systems biology.

hence computer science taught at a university as opposed to programming taught at a trade school. there is a reason that physicists receive very different training from mechanical engineers who receive very different training from mechanics. the world has a place for all these people. i, however, have zero desire to be a mechanic.

that nobody else is around the office so instead of being drowned in a deluge of ZOMG!EMERGENCY! emails i can actually make some progress towards my deadlines.