When the fog rolled in, the deer were everywhere. I never knew when I stepped outside whether it was day or night. Once I stepped outside and the parking lot was full of people and there was a fire truck. I discovered a fire alarm had gone off. Of course, no fire alarms in Mission Control. The fire alarms only went off on the Admin side. You are expected to work on console until you drop dead, or are relieved. I was on call 24/7. And that was via damn pagers. No cell phone. Us Integrators were the first to be called whenever there was a problem. Not that we knew it all, but we had an overall knowledge of the system, so we knew which specialists needed to be called, or was it something we could fix ourselves. We typically built a system for flight around once a week, there were so many revs. We were supposed to have 5 days for each build, but we did it 20 hrs straight and then finished up with the paperwork. We got used to always having problems just before launch, because, I think, the Flight Surgeons never supported the Sims. So they found their problems, just before launch. Just part of the job.
The early days were what I totally enjoyed. To me, there is nothing more boring than a successful test. There were tests where I opened a hundred discrepancy reports. Once all the problems were ironed out and things ran smoothly, it wasn't fun anymore.