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The Duration: A Week at the Office
At the start of the week I made a resolution: I would get up every day, put on a shirt with a collar, choose a good tie, step into shined shoes, and go to the office.
Previously I went downtown once a week to walk around and take the civic temperature, look at the construction projects, document the empty core. But this week I decided I would go to my desk, and sit there, and work. So I did.
The tie probably looked absurd, like an affectation, a sign of a bygone era – what’s next, bud, a straw boater? But you stand up straighter when you wear a tie. You feel put together. And you’ve always the option of loosening it with an aggravated growl if things get bad. What do people who wear nothing but sweatshirts do to indicate that they’re serious and ragged and ready to cut through the nonsense and get that damned Peter Parker to get some pictures of that damned Spider-Man menace, already?
The Last-Man-on-Earth vibe is strong downtown . . .
. . . except for the workers in bright safety vests working on all the things that need fixing or building. There was fresh landscaping around the building across the street, waiting for someone to admire it. There were new signs in the skyway telling us to cough into our elbow crook, and stay home if sick – hey thanks, never heard any of that.
The first day back at my desk was strange. The fourth felt absolutely normal. Except that the office was completely empty.
Well, almost; there’s one other writer who decided to do go back, and a few others drift in. “There’s no one here!” growled our famously cantankerous sportswriter when I saw him last week. “It’s the safest place in town!”
But today I was all alone. The newsroom is a large place. It has many wings, several floors. The lights are on, the monitors are all running – people were supposed to leave their PCs on for remote access. All of the big news monitors and displays of web traffic and story-trending were dark; a monitor by the door played congrats to the people who had service anniversaries in March. The big board where the month’s feature stories are planned was likewise stuck on March. I felt, again, like Charlton Heston in post-plague Los Angeles, looking at a calendar from long ago.
Except Chuck didn’t have access to fresh pizza. I did. The pizza joint in the skyway was open. It never closed. On a normal day they had 25 huge pizzas in every possible combination ready for the lunch crowd – maybe ten pies today, but it was hot and fresh. I had lunch at my desk, using a knife and fork I’d brought from home. Man, it was delicious. Then I filed a column, thinking: if there wasn’t any newspaper – if there wasn’t anyone else – I would still do this, for a while. But then I’d stop.
Had a call with some new Ricochet advertisers. You’ll love them! I discussed the new products while wandering around the empty office, ending up in the big conference room where the top editors assemble the paper, sitting in the big chair at the end of the long table, feeling like the pirate in the Tom Hanks movie. I am the editor now.
While I was on the call I got a notification from my phone: my parking meter was about to expire. Another routine from the Before Times. I fired up the app and added some time. When I’d done that on Monday, it had felt like an echo of a previous life; now it was routine. Again.
Left the office at the usual time, and walked past the great globe in the lobby. It’s a relic from our old building, restored. It revolves at the same pace as the Earth itself. When the Wuhan Virus slammed down they turned it off, and it’s been stuck in the same damned place ever since.
It will be plugged in again, soon. And the globe will turn.
Published in General
I always wear coat and tie (with appropriate slacks) when I go to court, whether or not I’m testifying. I view it as showing proper respect to the court. I’ve never gotten over how some people, especially defendants, dress for court. The few times I’ve brought it up to people, I get the excuse, “I can’t afford it.” Heck, you can dress very nicely indeed for the price of a couple days’ worth of cigarettes, at second hand stores.
People just treat you differently when you’re wearing a tie, and if appropriate, a coat. You do get more respect. There are exceptions, like when I had to work in gang – infested neighborhoods.
I know, “casual Friday” is now standard in many offices. I always thought it made such offices look, well, less serious, like they weren’t really showing respect for their clients.
There are non-profits that collect suits to dress defendants in.
Indeed. I’ve utilized their services.
I occasionally haunt second – hand stores for costume parts for productions of my barbershop chorus. Sometimes, once their need in that realm ends, they become part of my regular wardrobe.
A fellow investigator, at my first duty station, a particularly well – dressed fellow, bought all his clothes at second hand stores.
I made reference to a couple days’ worth of cigarettes in my last post. You might even end up with that white tie & tails for the price of a single dose of meth. So the choice is yours.
I miss my IBM Selectric. Still have my fountain pens.
Not to mention the jury pool. Last December I wound up in the pool for a half day. The instructions were very clear, and one of them was no blue jeans. I think I counted at least eight people in blue jeans out of about forty. I was the only one with a sport coat and tie.
At least you don’t have 4 hours of make up every morning, Stark one liners and some guy who gets angry too often.
Would that be the family orange/citrus tree?
For years, a friend in Oregon published a variety of semi-professional materials which included assorted illustrations by cartoonist Alexis Gilliland. One of them, focusing on the friend’s sometimes conspiracy-minded-ness, was him sitting at a typewriter powered by a hose connected to the kitchen water faucet with a lit candle on top for light. The caption was him typing “international conspiracy of electric power companies seeking world conquest…”
Good stuff. Lots of good memories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_E._Geis
and where does this stop? Buttered bread? Chocolate kisses? Hard candies? Breath mints?
My experience with typewriters burned so deeply into my psyche that in 1983 I used Turbo Pascal on a CPM box to jigger the files for Microsoft’s pre-Word word processing software to chain together several source files logically to make them look like one continuous document, paged properly with no breaks in the text for the entire 60 pages. Because it was less painful than typing and retyping and correcting and retyping.
Kids these days have no respect.
They’re dead, Jim.
Looking at construction is dangerous.
Just think of how much bureaucracy has been enabled by use of typewriters, and then computers… argh.
I wear a blazer for some occasions, but I do not like wearing a tie. The only times I have worn a tie in recent decades is when attending weddings or funerals.
In the mid-late 80s, I did some contract/consulting work in computers. I never dressed up, except one place had been getting complaints from the sales people about how they had to wear ties but nobody else did.
Imagine that! The only people who were seen in public/made contact with other people/businesses, being expected to dress well! Who woulda thunk?
But anyway, the decision came down – maybe from a Nancy Pelosi type, who knows? – that EVERYONE had to wear a tie, so the few sales people wouldn’t feel “oppressed” or something.
I quit.
The “manager” I dealt with at the time, couldn’t understand why. He’d say, “life is too short!”
But I realized a long time ago that when most people say “life is too short,” they mean “tolerate EVERYTHING.”
To me, “life is too short” means “tolerate NOTHING.”
A couple years, I think. It was in the lobby of the old building for years, until it was removed during some idiotic modernization scheme. Spent decades in a barn, restored by hand, and installed in our new office tower. The nations correspond to the original late-40s configuration.
I have a fountain pen as well – it’s a cartridge, though; I know I should be drawing from a bottle of Quink to be a real purist.
The only thing I miss about my Selectric is the satisfying noise and keyboard action. I do not miss paying money for correction tape.
Pray tell, explain
Could that mean, no Israel?
Uh oh.
When I was in Jr High and then High School, the family had a Smith Corona electric typewriter, that could use a correction “ribbon” but it was a separate cartridge. You couldn’t just press a key as with a Selectric. But it was a cartridge system, so still better than having to stick a correction thing inside, or worse yet Wite-Out.
The ink or carbon film “ribbon” had to be ejected, the correction “film” put in, strike over the mistake, eject the correction cartridge, put back the regular one, and keep going. Fairly easy to describe. But it could become tedious if you made a fair number of mistakes.
When things got REALLY “easy” was when the Selectrics not only backed up and used the correction film “automatically,” they also “remembered” at least the last several characters typed, and could erase them by itself.
It’s possible to get nice “clicky” keyboards with real mechanical micro-switches etc, but they’re not $5 at Big Lots. And it can be an expensive “habit” if you tend to spill things on them.
My Demand for Justice in the Ahmaud Arbery Case
Not tails, white tie, and a top hat? I’m stunned . . .
Hey, it was jury duty. I wasn’t trying to get kicked out for being crazy. What I do and how I dress in the comfort of my home office is my business.
No dippers, but I inherited a couple with internal bladders but haven’t used them for years because I am afraid the bladders will suddenly fail. I have been overjoyed to see Office Depot and Amazon stock old style Shaeffer cartridges, so now I am well-stocked and writing in style again. The IBM is long gone but the Apple IIE is in a box upstairs, along with floppy disks. I am not sure if I am too sentimental or an absurd packrat.
Many of the higher end pens were convertible to cartridge or bladder.
I use chopsticks for eating Cheetos-like snacks so I don’t get orange fingers.
They are good tools. Do you prefer Chinese, Japanese, or Korean style?
I’ve only ever heard of the big, poofy baked kind, and the little, hard, Neanderthal-club fried kind.
You’ve been missing out.
https://omgjapan.com/products/cheetos-wasabi-cheese-flavor