See, the deadlines that are the deadlines are not the deadlines. Those deadlines aren’t the real deadlines, just the deadlines that were given to you. The real deadlines are set by whoever can bug you enough to get their particular work done by their deadline, which they can’t tell you or then the magic would go away and the terrorists would win and there wouldn’t be any more unicorns.

Now, the unicorns live in the time between the real deadline and the deadline you get. Terrorists know this and threaten to expose the real deadlines to people who do the work. But project managers know that they can’t let unicorns die, so they hide the real deadlines as their parents and their parents before them hid deadlines in the dread Forest of Real Deadlines.

Of course, you’re responsible for meeting the real deadline or unicorns will turn into horses, so the poor project manager is left with no other choice but to harangue you and rearrange your schedule five times until you give up and do their task before the deadline they told you. But if you are lazy and believe the deadline they tell you, you’ll create another horse.

So basically, horses only exist because lazy people don’t meet the real deadline. But if you find out the real deadline, the unicorn explodes in an atomic fireball. This happened twice in quick succession in Japan, shaming the Emperor and causing him to capitulate to American project managers.

They learned their lesson well, which is why there are no horses in Japan but lots of horses for gay cowboys to ride in the US. Gay cowboys can’t ride horses in Japan, which makes them very sad, but not as sad as if the unicorns all died. So don’t ask gay cowboys what the real deadlines are. They won’t tell you.

I hope this clears things up.