Tag Archives: Memphis

Stand to the right…

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Since there were no pre-orders or reservations for the iPad 2, there’s really no difference between standing on the right or left this time around. All the early adopters and true believers are going to be lumped together with the casual buyers tomorrow. Probably a good move if your goal is to generate nice lines at 5:00 in time zones across America… conveniently scheduled to coincide with the evening local and network news cycles. Needless publicity stunt or not, I’ll be there tomorrow – in one of those rare moments when my desire for new and shiny overcomes my natural aversion to large groups of people.

I’ve got my product all picked out – 16GB, wifi, 3G over AT&T (seriously, they’re good for data… actual phone calls, of course, still suck). A spur of the moment panic about “what if” storage needs could bump that up to 32GB at the moment of truth, though. I mean who wants to be caught without enough storage for a crapload of TV episodes, songs, and apps, and the occasional movie, right? Although the new ability to stream media around the house may make the larger sizes redundant for all but the most serious power users.

Hopefully by this time tomorrow I’ll be home fondling my newest piece of kit. If you want the scoop, check back here in around 2:00 CST tomorrow when I’ll be blogging live and in person from the Apple Store in Memphis. Geeky? You bet. Fortunately, I’m pretty OK with that. See you in line!

It keeps me up at night…

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I’m not generally given to bouts of fear, but sometimes, lying in bed, late at night, I think some moments of trepidation are unavoidable – a product of a brain churning through a 100 different scenarios each more unpleasant than the last. Perhaps that’s the curse of the educated class; that we know the things we know and are thereby unable to live lives of oblivious happiness.

There are hundreds of possible “bad things” that one can reasonably fear. There are the perennial favorites: war, famine, plague, pestilence, dogs and cats living together. Then there are the more personal fears. Is tonight the night the “big one” is going to hit the New Madrid Fault? Is Uncle Sam going to open his doors on March 5th? And what could I have done to be better prepared? While those are quite real possibilities, that’s not the one that wakes me up at night.

The one that gets me every time is the fleeting notion that this 30-day hiring freeze could easily be extended through the end of the fiscal year – or beyond. Even more vexing is the thought that I’d then be sidelined here in Memphis indefinitely. It’s not an unreasonable thought. Should Congress pass a Continuing Resolution at or less than the funding level during FY10, I fear it’s altogether possible that the human resource managers at echelons above reality could decide that hiring and transfers are not currently in the best interest of the government due to the costs involved and in an effort to attrit the workforce into its desired size and composition. That would mean another six months marking time awash in a rising tide of disinterest and discontent.

To have gotten so close only to be turned away now would be a hammer fall. Even my self-confidence has its limits.

Reliability…

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One of the aspects of life in memphis you learn to respect (or at least expect) is that the tension between city and county government is going to, at the very least, be entertaining. Last week, the city’s elected school board gave up in disgust and handed in their charter to operate to the city. In theory, that means that the responsibility to educate the former city school student should fall to the Shelby County Board of Education. Of course dumping 150K+ urban students into the happily suburban school board’s lap was something they wanted no part of. Enter the State of Tennessee in the form of the legislature that swiftly passed a law postponing any actual changes. The assembled wise men of the legislature were followed by the lawyers – which almost guarantees that the issue could continue to provide almost limitless opportunities for entertainment for the foreseeable future.

I bust on Memphis alot, which as a taxpayer I consider both a right and a duty, but I suspect the issues at work here are less about Memphis as itself and more about the urban/suburban/exurban dynamic at play in cities across the country. I won’t even pretend at knowing the answer to those issues, but I think recognizing them is at least a starting point. Memphis is the classic city that still thinks of itself as a small town on the edge of the river, the cycles of agricultural boom and bust gave way to industrialization, which is sliding sideways into the post-industrial era without much of a plan or even a sense of itself as a city. This is going to get ugly, but it should be fun to watch. Memphis is reliable like that.

How you know it’s that bad…

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One of the worst kept secrets around is that I’m ready to move on. Other than to a few close friends and family I’ve never said it outright, but I suspect it’s more than obvious to anyone paying any attention at all. Memphis was never a place I planned on staying for a great length of time, but having the happy luck to fall in with a good team and a collapsing housing market made my three-and-out plan all but unworkable. I’d mostly made my peace with that. Or at least I thought I had.

The last year has proven to be more challenging professionally than I ever expected. And I’m not using “challenging” here in any of its quasi-positive connotation. The truth is, the last year has mostly sucked, but I didn’t know exactly how much it sucked until this morning when I found a federal job announcement in my career field for a position near my home town. I seriously considered it for way, way longer than I should have if my head were in the right place. I say that because although geographically desirable (to me at least), the job would have been a two-grade demotion, loss of $15,000 a year in pay, and I’d have to pay to get myself and all my stuff from here to there.

But I still though long and hard about it. And not in that wistful Norman Rockwell way. I’m talking about in that running financials and contemplating living in your parent’s basement for a year or two kind of way. You know it’s bad when voluntarily living in the basement to get away from what you’re doing now and for less money doesn’t seem all that bad by comparison. Yeah, I know I should be thankful to have a job and intellectually, I am. Emotionally, though, I’m spent… and it’s showing.

If anyone in Western Maryland sees me working weekends to make extra scratch in a couple of weeks, at least they’ll know why.

Criminal class…

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Dear Criminals,

I get that times are a little tough lately and that maybe you’re having a hard time keeping food on the table, or filling the tank so you can get to your regular job, or for whatever other nobel reason you have felt compelled to turn to the life on an outlaw. I know that Memphis is usually a criminal’s playground, but in the future we’re really going to have to insist that you keep that stuff inside the loop. The nice suburbanites out east don’t like it when you start robbing their banks. It makes us all nervous and jerky and in a state that has so many soccer moms with gun permits, nervous and jerky is not a good thing.

While we’re on the topic of banks, you might want to reconsider your mark. Sure, Willie Sutton robbed banks “because that’s where the money is,” but lets face it, this isn’t 1933 and most money is electronic now. Basically, by robbing a bank all you’ve done is make sure that instead of just Memphis police looking for you, the local FBI office now has a flag raised on you too. Maybe you’re not public enemy number one, but when it comes to criminal enterprise, the fewer people looking for you the better, don’t you think? You’d have been far better off knocking over a couple of Kwik-E-Marts and a liquor store. I’m just sayin’.

In selecting a life of crime, I understand that your long range planning skills probably leave something to be desired, but in the future I hope you will consider that most banks actually have working alarm systems and cameras and that instead of having a lonely retail clerk giving them a description of your unmasked face, the police and FBI now have you on film from several angels and a remarkably detailed description of the late model Pontiac you used as your getaway car.

In closing, I hope you’ll remember in the future that you suck at crime, probably at life too… But at accessorizing, you’re a champ. The apron really makes a statement.

Sincerely,

Jeff

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Havoc

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It’s 11:55 PM. My flight to Memphis has now been delayed three times tonight. The latest schedule is calling for a 11:59 departure. Since the plane we’ll be on hasn’t landed yet, I think that timeline has been pretty well blown. I understand weather delays happen, but after a hundred years of flight, you’d think there would be a better system in place for determining when a flight can reasonably be expected to leave than “it’ll be another 45 minutes”. Then again, I’m not a logistics expert. Oh yeah, I am. Grr.

P.S. The new “scheduled” departure time is 12:45 AM. You can’t see it but I’m rolling my eyes.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Construction zone update…

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We’re now at D+5 of the construction project. As of late yesterday afternoon, the slab is poured, the roof is on, and all of the inspections have been passed. It’s hard to believe the City of Memphis thinks a patio needs three separate inspections, but it is what it is. I stayed home this morning to meet the contractor and pick out stain for the ceiling. Once we get that squared away, it’s off to Lowes to pick out new light fixtures. The problem part of all of this construction is that I’ve come to realize I like seeing what I sketched out literally on the back of a napkin coming together. Of course it also has reminded me of all the other projects I have thought about doing to the house, too. I think I’d better get this one paid off before I bite off another chunk.

Scheming…

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Is it bad that I have only been back to work for three days and I’m already scheming about where I want to go on vacation next time? In between now and then, though, I have a few obligatory trips I need to make. One of my cronies from the office is getting married in October in Williamsburg so I anticipate being up there for an extended weekend and probably a “pass-through” visit to Western Maryland on my way back to Tennessee. Then of course there is the obligatory Christmas visit. After that, though, it’s pretty much an open slate. Maybe somewhere warm with a rum economy in the spring. If the euro would ever stop beating up on the dollar, I’d love to go back to Europe but I don’t foresee that happening any time in the immediate future.

It’s not so much that I’m out of good ideas as it is that I want to make these trips count since they’re getting to be pretty damned few and far between. One of the biggest problems with west Tennessee is that getting anywhere is an expedition that involves an overpriced airline ticket (for a hub airport, MEM is ridiculously expensive) out of the city or an all day drive in any direction. In the interim, I’m hoping to coax a few old friends to Memphis with the promise of world-class barbecue and… uhhhh… Bible study.

Snow…

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It’s Memphis… in March. There is absolutely no reason there needs to be snow here and yet, it’s out there covering everything. Actually, if I were being more specific, it’s slowly turning everything into a sheet of ice. Folks here are good at doing things like making barbecue, but when it comes to having a clue what to do about a couple of inches of snow, they should leave that to the professionals in the northern tier. I always mocked Washingtonians for their raging incompetence in dealing with this stuff… Now that I’ve seen how the south reacts, I’ll never say another bad word about them. These people couldn’t plow their way out of a parking lot, let alone keep the major highways clear. I’ve got a laundry list of things I wanted to do today, but I just don’t think I have it in me to go out and deal with “Memphis on Ice.”

Things you learn from weather.com…

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Sometimes I question myself for picking up and moving down here. Of course it would be nice to be closer to everyone and everything… and I’m still convinced that DC is the center of the universe… but then sometimes I surf by weather.com and realize that it’s 50 degrees warmer here than it is back there. At times like that being here seem like a much better idea.

The South is a different world, but it does have a few perks. Of course when it’s 110 in August, my calculus will probably be a little different.