Apparently, we’ve had four inches of rain in the past two hours. That would explain the street…
The only damage in out little corner of suburbia was from all the water that rushed into the laundry/storage room through a small gap in our garage door. It’s not a big thing; it’s just taking time that I desperately needed for other things this weekend, and sort of guaranteeing that I’ll be a big, streeed-out exhausted gob of goo by Monday.
But at least I’ll still have a house, even if it is one where the laundry room carpet is a little damp.
Side note: I’m inclined never to do business with this company. When I was a little more concerned about the water in the basement, I called to see how much they charged to come out and assess the damage. I was told that not only would they not give me a charge for the service call over the phone, they also (a) would not provide me with an estimate before they started work, and (b) would make me sign a form in advance saying that I would pay whatever the charges turned out to be.
I asked them how many people were stupid enough to fall for that. They couldn’t provide me an estimate on that either.
I didn’t really expect to be busier after the semester ended than I was beforehand, but I’m in the midst of a big client project that’s taking much longer than I expected. I’ve been trying to at least update the video, so anyone who cares will know I’m still alive. More updates soon, though, including the story of how yer humble host may become the world’s oldest graduate assistant, and other exciting tidbits.
Maybe “exciting” is too strong a term…
It’s way past 3AM. There have been no phone calls warning of the impending end of the world, or anyting like that. I just can’t sleep, because I have a lot of client-related stuff on my mind, none of which I’ll be able to take care of tomorrow because I’ll be sleepwalking through the day at a part-time job that pays squat, but to which I don’t even have the option of calling in sick. And after about three hours sleep tonight (and maybe five last night), I will pretty well qualify as “sick” once I arrive at work.
I had a job like this many years ago, and I swore I’d never take another one. But here I am. It seemed like a good idea a year ago (to me, at least) and it has allowed us to build up a decent “rainy day” reserve fund. But it just doesn’t seem worth the hassle anymore, especially when it’s keeping me from doing more lucrative work, and from engaging in activities that might further my actual career. And sleeping.
So I’m now resolved to be officially, ummm, separated from this position within a month. Pity it won’t do me any good tomorrow this morning.
All in all, though, I shouldn’t complain. At least I get to be awake at home at 3AM, rather than, say, in the Philadelphia airport.
Jeez, the past eight weeks or so have been pretty much one solid wall of pure drudgery for me, between buckets of client work, the end of the semester, and the sucky part-time job. It really just hasn’t stopped, and now that it’s winding down (at least for a while), I’m not quite sure how to react. As my perspective-laden husband has pointed out, it’s a lot better than the state I was in a couple of years ago, when I was largely unemployed and very worried about many things. But it still doesn’t change the fact that I’m flat-out exhausted and ready to do something fun.
The problem is that I don’t quite remember what’s fun. I have a sneaking suspicion it might not involve my computer nor spending more time at home. This is not to suggest, mind you, that I don’t love my house. I’ve just seen a little too much of it lately.
The scary thing is that there was probably no irony ivolved in the creation of this sign.
A lot of you probably know that I worked for Kinko’s for the better part of sixteen years, which works out to well over a third of my life and way more than half of my adult life. Interestingly, yesterday’s announcement that the Kinko’s name would be retired after almost forty years came on the third anniversary of my last day with the company.
Yer Humble Host, June 1993.
I was around for a lot of latter-day Kinko’s history, from the lawsuit that more or less ended its run as a producer of copyright-questionable course materials, to the FedEx acquisition in 2004. I started out as a part-time store “co-worker” in Greensboro and ended as a back office “team member” in San Francisco. In between, I took on numerous titles, part-time and full-time, some of them management-related, some of them training-related, and many of them just plain tedious. By the end, I was no longer waiting on customers nor making copies, but handling payroll, purchasing, random training, visual merchandising, and operations audits. It was never job I liked, but it was occasionally one I didn’t hate, and I met a lot of really great people there over the years.
The past five years or so have not been kind to my former employer. The global move away from paper-based document distribution aside, Kinko’s was largely resposible for its own undoing: the company seemed to have no clue which customers it wanted to attract (large companies? small businesses? church ladies reproducing the Sunday bulletin?) and also lost sight of how to treat its own employees. The “Kinko’s experience” became a pretty unpleasant one, and one that most customers probably would prefer to have avoided. And I imagine many did.
Right after the FedEx acquisition and the unveilinng of the new FedEx Kinko’s logo, we all speculated that the Kinko’s portion seemed something of an afterthought and would be easy to dispose of when the time came. Yesterday, the time came. I’m not sure that trashing four decades of brand equity is a wise move (no matter how the brand may have fallen) and I’m not convinced that the new name, FedEx Office, is much of an improvement. But I don’t work there anymore, so I really don’t have to care. It’s still a little sad, though. That name was a part of my life for a long time, for better or worse.
Goodbye, Kinko’s.
Latest addition to the ever-growing library at our house: the complete run of Progressive Architecture from 1953 to about 1990, and the complete Architectural Record from 1950 to 1969. These gems were picked up at the Forsyth County Public Library’s recent book sale, and I assure you we paid nowhere near $3000 for either set. The purchase required us to invest in four new six-foot bookshelves, bringing the total in our library to ten, plus four additional three-foot shelves in another room, for fiction.
Excessive? You be the judge. I have too much reading to do. I have to admit that it disturbs me to find that these items are still in the library’s online catalogue, even though they are very much in my house and likely to stay there.
Speaking of libraries (which I do a lot of lately), I start work tomorrow as a volunteer on a digitization project at the Greensboro Public Library. I’ll be scanning and cataloguing newspaper microfilm on the Greensboro sit-ins and other civil rights era stories. Should be interesting, and it will make nice resume fodder as well.
Wow. Who knew that the little cup that attaches to the top of the washing machine agitator and into which you put the fabric softener (your machine may vary) has a couple of removable parts that should probably be cleaned on a semi-regular basis? I sure didn’t.
But I never had my very own twenty year old washing machine before.
My current bathroom book is an early 1960s California guidebook Mark brought home recently, and as I was having my qaulity time this morning, I started wondering how differently things might have turned out for me if I’d followed my initial plan and moved to Southern California rather than San Francisco in 1992.
By the time I graduated from college, it was a near certainty that I’d be moving to California at some point. It was something I’d been considering for years, perhaps even before several close friends made the move. And once I visited for the first time, I was pretty sure California would be my ultimate destination.
San Francisco, though, didn’t really even register as a possibility at first; it was completely off my radar. I was visualizing Los Angeles, or maybe San Diego. Both of these places seemed much more interesting to me than San Francisco. In many ways, they still do. I enjoy the miles and miles of “dense sprawl” that typifies the region, giving it a level of urban intensity, texture, and variety unlike any other sunbelt city, but with a distinctly American low-rise openness and car-friendliness that’s absent in old-style cities like San Francisco and New York. I think I like the “feel” of Los Angeles better than any major American city with the possible exception of Chicago.
After visiting, though, I did eventually choose San Francisco, based on three factors:
- The weather: I was really impressed with the fact that it was so cold and foggy in San Francisco in July.
- My friends: I knew more people in San Francisco than I did in Southern California, so I had more of a social safety net, not to mention roommate possibilities.
- Ummm, sex: There seemed to be much more of it in San Francisco, and it was one of my primary hobbies at the time. It helped that walking (rather than driving drunk) to and from bars was an option there as well.
All in all, I guess it was a more or less reasonable choice, at least for that point in my life. Living in a more traditionally “urban” setting provided a certain perspective that has been important to me over the years, and spending the 1990s in the technology capital of the US (and probably the world) was obviously a major and life-altering influence. Without the technological focus, there would have been no website starting in 1996, which would have sent my life in a considerably different direction, both personally and professionally. It’s definitely a good thing that I opted for San Francisco, despite my eventual disenchantment with the place.
But I’ve often regretted not spending more time down south while I was still on the west coast. I find the Los Angeles area much more fascinating than the Bay Area now, and, aside from my friends in San Francisco, the “Southland” is actually the part of California I really seem to miss. Of course, a major part of this is probably the fact that I never faced the everyday reality of actually living there, which allows me to romanticize the area. I never had to cope with the depressingly sunny and warm climate, nor with commuting via the traffic-choked freeways. I spent my time there doing things I wanted to, not things I had to.
And since I never lived in Southern California, and never spent quite enough vacation time there, I never got the chance to explore the area sufficiently, nor to grow weary of it once I’d “seen it all”.
Moving back to California is not a likelihood for me (it wouldn’t be economically realistic even if I wanted to, which I don’t) but it would be nice to find an excuse to spend a few months exploring Los Angeles. Maybe I can come up with an internship or something.