The earth did not move. Yet.

Okay, after my rant the other day, I ended up giving the four guys who effected my move $20 each. They were competent, and of an ethnic group that puts them at risk for illegal visits by ICE, so I just forked over more than I’ve ever tipped movers before.

I’m not happy that the end price was about 12% higher than the quote, and I’m still looking for my down jacket that one of them packed in some carton not with any of my other clothes, but I guess I should be glad that his crew chief asked me what I wanted done with my handbag before it, too, ended up in a carton.

I’m in my new place, where I was greeted by chickadees and juncos—have to get a bird feeder tout suite, because I am not throwing stuff out to be gobbled up by squirrels—and I have a new water heater, connectivity and TV. I reckon I’ll eventually figure out the rest.

But I do have to go look for that jacket.

Staying within the lines

Here’s a view I probably won’t be seeing for a while:

Sunrise over the Capitol, riding into the District They Call Columbia on the Yellow Line.

I’ll be a Silver Line girl soon.

A moving tale

Since I’m moving house this week, I went out yesterday to the nearest bank to get smallish bills for tips. The nearest bank in this instance was Bank of America, an institution I’ve despised since the 70s, and they didn’t disappoint even now.

Because having legal currency of the United States isn’t enough for them to exchange for other denominations of legal currency; you have to have an account with them for them to move their arse.

So, no tenners for the movers.

But on my walk back to the office I considered that, since this moving company is charging me 25% of my total costs of moving from the West Coast to the East last year to haul my kit from one NoVa county to the next, I should perhaps expect them to be paying their staff so well that tips are not welcome.

As an aside, I got a quote from this same company for the cross-country move, which came in at about $5K more than the next highest one. And the estimator this time, in surveying my effects to come up with his 25%-of-a-3000-mile-relo quote, glanced at my pictures on the wall, got the vapors and said, “You’ll want to move those yourself.”

Evidently charging more than two large for a 20-mile move doesn’t include packing and transporting anything that might break.

The writing on the wall

I was attempting to clear out my hard drive—a task which I find exceedingly difficult because it’s kind of like your junk room: you just heave stuff in there willy-nilly until you’ve got a right mess, with the added layer of complexity that usually you only heave one thing into your junk room, but there is pretty much an infinite number of times you can save a file to your hard drive, if it’s living in different folders—and came across this photo I shot a few years ago.

The tagger decorated the wall outside my condo complex, and I wondered what statement s/he was trying to make.

About foolishness?

About fuel consumption?

About some conflation of the two?

And was the number 1 appended to distinguish it in a limited series of tags? Like lithographs by Andy Warhol?

Sadly, the condo association washed it out shortly after it appeared, so I’ll never know.

I’ll also probably never know how many copies of this I’ve saved to my hard drive.

Gratitude Monday: Fade to black

As follow-on to my Gratitude Monday post last week, I am truly, madly, deeply grateful today that the dag-blamed pitch is in the can.

Well, since we are in the Digital Age, technically I’m glad that the video is on my hard drive, a jump drive and in the cloud.

I’m a girl who likes redundant systems.

I can’t believe how long it took to get this 90-second piece put together: more than two hours shooting take after take (including another session this past Friday because, after viewing what we shot the previous Sunday, I was so appalled that I suited up and drove out to west nowhere Fairfax County to do it all over again), and then almost two hours with the editor to lay in the background and a cool fade to black at the end.

So today I’m grateful for two things: I’ve got friends who went to bat for me, setting up, shooting and editing. And I’m looking at the damned thing in my rear view mirror.

Moving stories

Y’all know how I love the sidebars of life all around me—yard decorations, business signs, bumper stickers and vanity license plates… I like playing with what the stories behind them might be.

Now, this one I’m guessing belongs to someone from western South America, and there were nine people also from that part of the world ahead of him/her at the DMV.

But this one is a little more interesting—it’s on one of those boxy Honda Elements that is often parked on the street outside my flat overnight (because there’s frost or dew on it when I walk to the Metro station in the morning).

Visual Basic is so turn-of-the-century. It dates right about to the time when pre-Time-Warner AOL had pretensions of being everybody’s on-ramp to the information superhighway. I wonder if the Element’s owner has had the license plate since before the dot-bomb, or whether s/he is just nostalgic for the Good Old Days?

Food for thought

Well, what can I say—we each #resist in our own fashion.

(Actually—the fact that "meat clown" is even a thing worries me a good deal.) 

Brainstorming downtime

Ah, HR—always trying to be relevant.

The latest out of the satrapy is the vaunted “Employee Downtime Area”, announced last year without any employee demand whatsoever. They’re taking the only place in the 13-floor edifice where you can get away from your desk to eat your lunch (without leaving the building) and converting it into “a new area where employees can now relax and socialize with their colleagues in a fun, informal setting.”

Yippee.

To this end, here’s what we can look forward to later this month:

“Brainstorm Corner* with couches, television/AV monitor and whiteboard wall

“Foosball Table with adjacent high-top tables and stools for viewing/queuing

“Mini Free Library (Take-a-Book, Leave-a-Book honor system) and lounge chairs”

*Don’t even ask, because I just can’t…

I don’t believe the ladies of HR have entirely thought this thing through, bless their hearts. Because how are you expected to be downtiming when your colleagues are either brainstorming with the whiteboard and TV monitor, and/or whooping it up at the foosball table?

Wanna know what employees would really appreciate? Employer-supplied coffee and tea on each floor and an espresso machine in that “Employee Downtime Area”.

Because nothing says “relax” like a double latte with a shot of hazelnut syrup.

Cyberstalking

I’ve shared a selection of Facebook follies before—how they’re always trying to prompt me into having the sort of life they think I should be having.

Well, they’re back.

In the space of less than 24 hours, I got two of their intrusive “suggestions”.

First there was this chirpy greeting:

Seriously—if that’s not creepy, I don’t know what is.

And then there was this, must have been Sunday morning, although I didn’t see it until night.

Guys—if your algorithm hasn’t picked up on the fact that I have never commented one way or another on any sporting event, then you need to hire a whole new batch of SDEs.

(Oh, and P.S.: why on earth would I want to share that with anyone?)

They put this crap right at the top of your timeline, like it’s so important. And however many times I click on the “see fewer bits of nonsense like this”, they still come back to see if I’ve changed my mind. Like a four-year-old.

I do not need Facebook to sidle up with a weather forecast to let me know that they know where I am. And I don’t need their assumptions that I’m watching anything on TV at any time.

What I would like would be for them to quit resetting my timeline preference, and to explain to me why things that show up in the Facebook mobile app do not appear in my browser feed (and vice versa).

Gratitude Monday: Pitching a fit

My department at work sponsored a six week class whose aim is to teach our colleagues some of the principles and methodologies of coming up with workable business ideas. You know, like “Airbnb for dogs” (an actual thing, which I know because they just closed a $40M round of funding a few months ago), or Birchbox for demolitions (not an actual thing. That I know of. Yet).

After a month and a half of learning and practicing this, the culmination was a pitch competition: each of the eleven* of us had to pitch a business idea to a panel of three judges, with six finalists being chosen to go one more round, where they post a two-minute video of our pitch to the Intranet, and our colleagues throughout the company vote on two final winners.

(*Eleven because, while five people dropped out well before the pitch week, four more just announced less than a day before the big session that they wouldn’t be participating. No particular reason, beyond, “stuff happens.” Lesson learned for the next time we do this: we make people sign an agreement that if we spend this money bringing an external instructor in to teach you, you drag your sorry ass to the finish line.)

Well, dear reader, I’ll cut a long and shaggy story short: the good news is that I did not disgrace myself. The bad news is that I’m one of the finalists and therefore have to cough up a video. (Even though I am not eligible for the prize, since my department is putting this thing on. And it’s a good prize.)

And I would rather swallow ground glass than be in a video, much less be the only person in a video.

Well, but (and this is the focus of my gratitude) I am not without resources. Friends of mine run a photography and videography studio, and I traded them an hour of my writing work for them shooting my video. I spent a good part of the day yesterday with them, working on this (and the writing project). It was fascinating, because although I got plenty tired of hearing my voice muff my spiel take after take in front of the green screen, they kept me going, and I’m almost looking forward to seeing the finished product.

And therefore, in conclusion, I’m grateful that I did not have to go through this ordeal all alone, just me and my laptop cam.

Thank you. I actually will be here all week, and you should definitely tip your server.