2001-10-10

In three and a half years of living in our place I've never forgotten to pay the rent before. In fact we tend to be highly efficient in our bill-paying. (Which, I realize is a pun; our landlord's name is William.) But what with the craziness of last month, between the terrorist attacks, the cancelled trip, being off work, layoffs, and moving at work, I totally spaced out about it. It wasn't until today when the landlord called to check on us that I even thought about it. (And I'd thought about sending two months worth of rent last time I wrote a check; too bad I hadn't.)

I'm writing this from my new, bright�very bright�windowless office. The new building is huge; it holds close to a thousand people. Since we're in the first portion to move in, everything is still in process: Lots of doors and walls still need to be painted; details are still covered in protective plastic sheeting. At least a third of the building is uninhabitable until some serious construction gets done, so there's still banging and drilling and paint fumes all around us.

The facilities are decent, though between the lights which don't turn off and the blindingly white walls, I'm going a little snowblind. The lack of windows in my new office doesn't bother me as much as it affects my sense of time -- it's nearly seven as I write this but without the computer's clock, I would have no idea. We were all used to our dim, quiet corner in the old building, where no one walked through except us. Now there are sales and marketing people who shuffle around all day, talking together in the hallways and loudly on the phone in the cubicle spaces. We used to think of them as the enemy. Now that our groups have merged physically and not just on a flowchart, we are them. This will take some getting used to.

The new office is in what's called "South Beach", a real estate euphemism which caught on, to my great dismay. Actually, we're a little inland for that; we're more in the "Southern Financial District," close to the heart of "New Media Gulch." (as opposed to "Media Gulch," a couple blocks of big advertising houses I used to walk through to get to work. Ugh, I'm getting buzzworded-out.)

I used to work serving coffee deep in the Financial District, serving the usually pinched and withdrawn professionals at the Bechtel Building. This is nothing like that, either. It actually reminds me in spirit of Manhattan; the Midtown South business district we'd walk through, from Chelsea to Grammercy Park. (Is that "Silicon Alley", as they called it?) To the eye, nothing is much different from the dot-com bust on our block; construction still proceeds, lots of Pacific Bell employees wander about, enjoying our late-season sunny days. A block away, former dot-com buildings still stand vacant with "for lease" signs in the windows.

Mom and Dad came up this weekend for lunch and to buy me an early birthday present: The new television which I've threatened to buy for months now. I had to be decisive in order to keep them from spending way-too-much on a way-too-big TV. In the end I like the one we ended up with, even though it isn't black. I was actually in a pretty bad mood that day, but I tried hard to be nice. Lately I've felt like I've been a dick to everyone, and one doesn't want to be a dick to one's parents, especially when they came up to give a gift! (I might be overreacting; it's happened before that no one claims to have noticed anything untoward when I apologize for behaving abominably.) Regardless, I had a really nice time going to a late lunch with them. We talked like friends, which is always a good feeling.

I spent a lot of time this weekend sleeping, something I hadn't been doing the week before with getting ready for the move into the new office. We seem to have collected a lot of crap in the past five years. I got the added chore of sorting through the well organized papers of my former boss, who saved project folders with nothing inside them, one-off graphic requests for sites which no longer exist, and invoices for projects which were not only paid for, but already recycled. When is this paperless office thing supposed to happen, exactly? I was probably the wrong person for the job, since I remembered all the projects and would stop to look through the more memorable ones (and probably saved a few more than were really necessary, too. I'm sentimental, even about work.)

In addition to packing up far too many little toys and items of memorabilia, some books and a few boxes of my own paperwork (Now I see where I got it) I scavenged vendor-supplied office supplies, tshirt samples and other throwaways and took the bus home, three bags of crap in tow. Dumped it all in my even-more-cluttered-than-usual bedroom and had a very fun night at Ba-Da-Bingo. Anyone need a canvas tote bag?

Otherwise the weekend was, well, pretty much a bust. As I neglected to make plans for Saturday night, nothing happened at all. And then Sunday, what happened? Oh, yeah, we went to War. Silly me, I forgot! That did wonders for my mood. I spent my Sunday vaguely pissed off that I didn't get my shit together enough to do something more focused than grocery shopping. I hate that mood, where I can't even decide which video game I'd like to distract myself with. Irritable merely suggests the seething and paranoid ramblings my unfocused mind makes. The structure and focus of work is one of the few sources of relief, so on the plus side, the approaching monday seems less onerous.

As long as you can stand the glare.

2003-03-29 - Moving Notice
2002-06-04 - Accordians and Ambassadors (Diary Fragment)
2002-05-24 - Manias (Diary Fragment)
2002-05-09 - See this little island here?
2002-04-24 - Bored and Drippy.