My new commute

I’ve been in the new office for about a week now.

It’s kind of … meh.

It looks nicer, for sure, but there are a lot of differences. The most notable, I guess, from the outside is we’re no longer a few floors over a mall. It’s a real office building, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you take away the options of Giant Supermarket and the food court on 3A (remember, no fourth floor), the food supply dwindles.

Most people are coping by ordering out, but I don’t do that much. I’m bringing PB sandwiches, and I think I’m already tired of PB sandwiches. Blah.

I did cave in and get a milkshake from Fat Burger (which, as it turns out, is owned by Queen Latifah), but it was a bad idea. Three people got them and two had no problems, but my sides were hurting. It wasn’t a bad milkshake, but it was incredibly melty. I’m not sure where Fat Burger is, but judging by the consistency, that sucker had been in room temperature at least 20 minutes. Not a great initial order-out success.

The people who got burgers from there were happy with them, so maybe I’ll do that in the future. There’s also an Italian place that delivers that might be good.

My big issue with ordering out is when the shift starts at 3, the orders get placed around 4. I can’t do that. It’s likely that most people wake up pretty much right before they leave, so they’re essentially ordering their first meal of the day, but I’ve already eaten breakfast and lunch when I get there. I just can’t order a big meal two hours after eating lunch.

More than anyone needs to know about my lunch ritual, I’m aware.

Back to the offices: it looks nicer, but the spaces we’re sitting at have reduced to cubicles too basically just a little table with a drawer. These are all strung together, so it looks like we’re at either side of one long table. There’s not even enough space at the computer terminal to unfold a paper or leave a notebook out.

We each have a drawer as our “personal space,” but the tables are so low, if you’re over, oh, say, 5-foot-6, your knees bang it. So several people have opted to remove their drawers during work hours and place them directly behind them.

I don’t have this option, because there is some door right behind me. I’m not really sure what’s in there – it’s some techy room – but people go in and out. I put my newspaper behind me one day, not realizing there was a door there, and it disappeared. Someone moved it out of the way.

The newsroom is smaller than the old one but we’ve crammed more people in there. It’s really just an odd move. I guess parent company, which owned the mall building as well as the new building, got a higher-paying tenant for the old space.

My commute has doubled to about 35 minutes, but it IS walkable, which I wasn’t sure about. So that’s great news.

Thus far, it’s been OK to walk back, too, which I really didn’t think would happen. I am positive there will be some days when I cannot commute by foot because it’ll rain, but considering one day this past week I left at 12:40 a.m. and had no issues, I pretty much feel fine making the walk back.

It’s super hot and muggy some days and I try to get there early to go into the bathrooms (which are nicer and bigger than our old ones but have ZERO water pressure – trying to wash your hands is near impossible) and cool off.

I got rained on a little once, but I had my umbrella with me, so it wasn’t a big deal. The sweat is the big thing. When I get home, I pretty much jump straight into the shower, and the trip home is much cooler than the walk there.

My walk is about 35 minutes. It’s roughly five minutes from the apartment road to the first main road, then 10 minutes on that and then 10 through a neighborhood and finally the last 10 on a very main road.

The sidewalks are horrible when there are sidewalks. We are talking 10-foot stretches of open sewers, where I have to step into the street (and oncoming traffic) to not fall in, and parts that just have no sidewalk, so when it’s muddy it’s pretty scary. My biggest fear, I think, is losing my balance on the edge of the sidewalk and falling into traffic.

But I do feel safe. The walk through the neighborhood is the slightly weird part, but for the most part, the people who are out are just sitting, playing chess, smoking or taking down their little fast food places.

To entertain myself on the walk home, I count the rats. Last post I joked about only seeing two or something like that, but the very next day I doubled it. That particular day, I saw one dead one and one live one that might be dead by now. I was walking home on the apartment road stretch and saw this cute kitty. Just as I said “Hi, kitty!” this rat ran out of a sewer pipe and the cat gave chase. I’m confident one of them walked away happy.

Since then, on my walk home, there’s only been one day where I didn’t see a rat. My high so far is three, but one is the norm. There’s a slight paranoia when I wear sandals.

Moving day at the office was surreal. We finished on a Friday and they moved the offices that night and Saturday, then Sunday it was back to work in the new office.

The copy editors are among the last to finish work. My old desk faced a wall, and as I worked, I kept hearing loud noises behind me. I finally said at one point that it sounded like a party and turned around. Lo and behold, it was a party.

As each desk was finishing, they were joining the party. And, as they were partying, the techs were disassembling their computers.

Every time I’d get up, there’d be more big empty spaces. The person who sat beside me left his shift at 6 p.m., and in no time at all, someone came and took everything away.

It was like working the OR at a MASH unit. We were working as everything came down around us, and if you got up for more than three minutes you risked not having a workstation when you got back.

But now everything’s settled in. It’s not really comfortable, but that’s what we’re working with.

I finally was able to take my passport to be renewed, and now I’m facing another deadline. According to the US Embassy, it will take two weeks (maybe a little quicker), and that would mean a new passport on 5/31.

Well, the rest of the paperwork has to be completed by June 10, which means that it’s going to be cutting it close, especially since I have to exit and reenter the country by then. (I don’t plan the trip, but I have to make it.)

I’m just not really sure how they go about it, but I am under pressure to get the passport finished. Unfortunately, I have no control over that, but sometimes I wonder if the powers that be understand that. It’s pretty common for the Indonesian government to accept bribes, but as far as I know, the State Department doesn’t, and I wasn’t going to ask.